March 18, 2025 • 34 mins
When Don Hejny toured with big country artists, he had a sweaty problem: his glasses would not stay put on his nose. Annoyed at constantly having to adjust them, he took matters into his own hands. He found inspiration from a childhood tool - surf wax - and after three years of tinkering, NerdWax was born. He took his idea to Kickstarter, then to Shark Tank, then finally to Instagram, when he nearly lost all of his sales to an iOS Update.
Join Ben and Kathleen Griffith as they chat with Don about finding inspiration everywhere, how he was his own best product tester, and how he leveraged his appearance on Shark Tank even though he didn’t take the deal. These are The Unshakeables.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Don Hejny was just an average guy with an average problem. His glasses kept sliding down his nose and he was determined to find a solution. Three long years of product testing later he finally had his surf wax inspired, anti-slip glasses wax nailed down.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
I'd raise sixty thousand dollars. I now had our first
production run of nerd wax. I was like, this is amazing.
Everything's going great.
Speaker 1 (00:32):
Don got that first shipment in and it was so
exciting finally seeing all of his hard work pay off.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
And I open up the box and every tube is breaking.
Like you go to twist the nerd wax out of
the tube, and every single tube is just breaking. The
nerd wax doesn't protract out of the tube, The little
turning mechanism breaks in your hands. And I was like,
how many of these do we have? I think our
first initial order was five thousand units.
Speaker 1 (01:02):
And there was nothing Don could.
Speaker 3 (01:03):
Do with them.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
Welcome to The Unsheakables from Chase for Business and Ruby
Studio from iHeartMedia. I'm Ben Walter, CEO of Chase for Business.
On The Unshakeables, we're sharing the daring moments of small
business owners facing their crisis points and telling the stories
of how they got through it. Today we're talking to nerds,
which makes me feel very comfortable. But I'm also talking
(01:29):
to Kathleen Griffith definitely not a nerd. Kathleen, welcome back.
Speaker 2 (01:34):
Ben.
Speaker 3 (01:34):
Before you say anything else, I want to say how
great of a name is nerd Wax for a company.
Speaker 4 (01:39):
It's fun.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
Don's a fun guy, and I'm excited for this story.
I love this small business. And I also have to
say I'm a not so secret Star Trek fan.
Speaker 3 (01:47):
Yes, I do know that about you. Does that mean
there will be a Star Trek mentioned today?
Speaker 1 (01:53):
Absolutely? The company we're talking about today is very invested
in quote unquote nerd culture.
Speaker 3 (01:58):
Ay yes, Okay, Well, well I'm excited to see how
we get from surf Wax to Star Trek.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
All will be made clear in a moment on today's episode.
Nerd Wax from Nashville, Tennessee. Don officially welcome to The Unshakeables.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
Thanks Ben.
Speaker 1 (02:19):
Don grew up using surf wax. He's from California, and
he's a nerd. But it took a while to put
those two together.
Speaker 2 (02:26):
I used to be a touring audio engineer, I did
the Miley Cyrus Best of Both Worlds tour. I did
a bunch of radio Disney stuff for a while, so
I toured with Everlife. We did a run with the
Jonas brothers, worked for Keith Urban for a bit. I
did Julianne Huff for a bit.
Speaker 1 (02:42):
He moved through the Nashville touring circuit, and week after
week he was out on the road and a week
after week he had the same issue, namely sweat.
Speaker 2 (02:52):
So we would do these outdoor concerts and festivals in
the summer, and my glasses were always all over the place.
I had tried different solutions like hooks or bands and straps,
and none of those worked for me because I wanted
something that wouldn't change the look or feel of my glasses.
So I wanted to be able to wear my glasses
as normal, but then also not have them slide. I
(03:13):
just realized, like, hey, if I could make something that
would be hydrophobic, so it would block the sweat on
your glasses and would stick to your nose pads. I
kind of thought surfers use wax on their boards in
the water to give them extra friction. I wonder if
I could make the same thing, but make a cosmetic
grade so that your glasses wouldn't slide your on your nose.
Speaker 1 (03:33):
Surf wax, for the non surfers in the room, is
a super sticky wax that comes in bar form. You
put it on the surfboard to help you get a
better grip on the board, and crucially it's made for surfboards,
not glasses.
Speaker 2 (03:46):
The first time I actually tried this and I scratched
the glasses, and then I tried a different surf wax
and it made my skin break out, and I was like,
I'm going to have to actually formulate something with your
skin in mind.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
While Don was trying to find the perfect formula for
cosmetic grade surf wax that wasn't really surf wax, he
was still a full time audio engineer. He'd be out
on the road during the week and come home on
the weekends.
Speaker 2 (04:12):
I would like make a batch in our kitchen and
then I would take it out on the road. I
would see if it worked or if it didn't work.
If I had had like a little touring kitchen with
me on the road, it probably wouldn't have taken three years.
But it was really just a side hustle I wanted
to make it for myself, like I wanted to use it,
and because I wanted to use it, I was willing
to just do whatever it took to make it.
Speaker 1 (04:34):
That was three years of touring and wax that was
too sticky or not sticky enough. A lot of people
would have given up by now, but Don approached nerd
wax the same way he approached his career in music.
Speaker 2 (04:46):
My kind of north Star has always been to be creative,
the creative process. That's what I love. Taking the seed
of an idea, then making that and then seeing it
happen in reality. It's magic. There's no other word for
it other than it feels like alchemy. It feels like, Oh,
(05:06):
I thought of this thing, and now here it is,
in real life, right in front of me, and it
is the coolest thing. It's just magic.
Speaker 1 (05:14):
The magic it paid off.
Speaker 2 (05:17):
I arrived at the formula that is still the formula
for nerd wax today, and so that's beeswax, coconut oil
and gum resin. It's a really simple, all natural formulation.
Speaker 1 (05:27):
But by the time he had his formula down, ironically enough,
he didn't really need it anymore. He had his wife
and three kids, and he was ready to leave life
on the road and be with his family.
Speaker 2 (05:37):
I get Nerd Wax to the place where I feel like, Okay,
I have a product here. I've given it out to
friends and family, and I've established that it works. People
like it. They're asking me for it. But I have
this problem, which is I don't have labels for nerd Wax,
and it stops me from handing them out.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
Don's worry about packaging was understandable. It's hard to scale
a product only available in unmarked tubes.
Speaker 2 (06:07):
I needed five grand to do a first run of labels,
and I didn't have the cash. I also didn't want
to keep spreading it around without it looking like something.
I wanted the world to see.
Speaker 1 (06:21):
What happened next. It's straight out of a country song.
Speaker 2 (06:26):
Right at the same time is when I kind of
had this two week period where both of our cars
broke down. My wife broke her ankle, I lost my job.
Our landlord called and he wouldn't renew our lease. That
was the moment that I had to decide if I
was going to stay on the road and keep on
that course, or if I was going to make a
change and do something different.
Speaker 1 (06:48):
Don decided to make a change. He needed a way
to provide for his family, even if it meant putting
his creative projects away for a while.
Speaker 2 (06:56):
I got a job working for Dave Ramsey in Nashville.
Speaker 1 (07:00):
Dave Ramsey, for those of you who don't know, is
a financial advisor based out of Nashville, Tennessee. He's best
known for his no nonsense advice on his radio show
and podcast, and his cash focused debt payoff methods.
Speaker 2 (07:13):
When I was at Dave Ramsey and I was producing
the Entrepreneur Leadership podcast, and my job was like to
read through these business books, and I was doing a
case study on how to start a business with no debt.
I had researched a bunch of kickstarters, and I thought, Man,
what if I just did a kickstarter for one of
my ideas, Like just see if there's product market fit.
So twenty fourteen is when I launched my kickstarter for nerd.
Speaker 1 (07:34):
Wax Don set a goal of raising five thousand dollars
to produce the labels of his dreams.
Speaker 2 (07:40):
By noon on the first day of the campaign, we'd
reached our five thousand dollars goal, and then by the
end of the thirty day campaign, we had raised over
sixty thousand dollars.
Speaker 1 (07:50):
Don had split his campaign into two timelines. The first
round of backers would get theirs in September, the others
later that fall. He decided on doing the first run
in his house and partnering with the manufacturer for the second.
Speaker 2 (08:03):
When we first started, we were filling into lip balm tubes,
and lip balm tubes were a great medium at the
time because they were really easy to find. Lip Balm
tubes are made for lip balm. They're made for a
greasy substance, and I was putting this hard, tacky substance inside,
and so what would happen is the mechanism that you
twist at the bottom of the tube to get the
lip balm to come out, that mechanism would break.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
Don and his wife managed to get the first batch
fixed and sent out for the next order. Don found
a manufacturer who could solve the broken lip balm tube issue.
Speaker 2 (08:37):
We did some tests with them. Everything looked great. They
sent me a batch of nerd wax to test out,
and they said, hey, we noticed there's like a few
issues with some of these tubes. Can you try them out?
And so they sent me a box of them, and
I opened up the box and every tube is breaking.
All five thousand units come off the line and they're
(08:58):
just broken.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
Same issue as before, but this time on a much
larger scale.
Speaker 2 (09:05):
I was asking the manufacturing partner what they could do
to fix it, and they were like, this is your thing,
We're just filling it for you.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
Wow. And did you ever get money back for the
bad run.
Speaker 2 (09:16):
They made a seat that one.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
Oh that's brutal. Yeah, it was brutal, Kathleen, What a
terrific story that is, isn't it.
Speaker 4 (09:27):
Nerds rule the world.
Speaker 1 (09:28):
Nerds do rule the world. He even put in the name.
Speaker 4 (09:30):
Of his business avenge of the Nerds.
Speaker 1 (09:31):
I mean, that was one of my favorites back in
the I have to say that was one of my
favorites because we have lots of different types of businesses
on The Unshakeables, I have a real affinity for people
who make stuff. Partly is my patriotic streak of wanting
to manufacture in America, but part of it is also
I have a personal proclivity for that. I think it's
(09:53):
super interesting when people create a physical good that didn't
exist before. But on the flip side. The manufacturing businesses
are typically capital intensive businesses, right, Like, it's not like
consulting where if your cost is you or the people
and you can flex them. You're talking about equipment, you're
talking about research and design. This is a different animal.
Speaker 4 (10:12):
Right, Ain't that the truth? Yeah, it really is. It's
not for the faint of heart.
Speaker 3 (10:17):
You know, he was talking about it being left with
five thousand units. I mean it's the stakes are real.
The stakes are really real, and.
Speaker 1 (10:24):
It's never efficient to manufacture in small quantities or rarely efficient.
I should say. It means you're always taking that inventory
risk when you try something new. And how do you
feel about things like crowdfunding in terms of getting something started.
It's a brilliant platform because it really does two things.
It gives you essentially not free, but discounted marketing, and
it gives you advanced cash flow for your manufacturing process,
(10:46):
right because people pay now and get later.
Speaker 2 (10:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (10:49):
I think a lot of times people forget about Kickstarter
or it's not really top of mind. But it makes
so much sense because you're also seeing what is the
real legitimate market appetite for your product. I think a
lot of founders don't want that negative feedback. There's a
part of them that doesn't want to be told there's
no there there. But I think it's a great way
(11:11):
to test the waters and see if it works.
Speaker 1 (11:13):
Yeah, I'd rather find out I don't have a product
market fit before I spend the money than after I
spend the money. Are there any lessons you've seen people
learn with regard to negotiating with manufacturers, sourcing manufacturers. I mean,
you must see your clients go through this all the time. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (11:28):
The biggest issue is seeing people moving from home manufacturing
doing it themselves, you know, or with friends and family
in this very labor intensive way, to then figuring out
how to get a manufacturer on board. So there was
an entrepreneur that I was advising, she has a skincare business,
she's doing it at home, had a bad experience like
(11:49):
Don did with a manufacturer, and so went back home.
So you see this kind of advance retreat, advance retreat,
and the business shrinks or expands as a result of that.
Finding the right manufacture is tough and it's a long process.
I think people get very overwhelmed by everything you need
to do. Once you have an idea, and to break
(12:10):
it down really simply, it's you've got an idea right
step one. Step two is you've got to do your
customer research, which is easier now than ever because you
can do it in social media and all these other places.
Step three is to create a prototype, a minimally viable product.
Step four is to validate that with the market so
product market fit. And step five is then to place
(12:31):
your orders. And I think that's the piece we can't
underscore enough in hearing this too. It can take years,
and it doesn't mean your product isn't scalable. It just
means it's going to take time to find the right partner.
Speaker 1 (12:46):
Okay, let's get back to Don. After the broken tube debacle,
Don still worked for Dave Ramsey and nerd Wax was
still in the lip balm tubes for better or worse.
But now nerd Wax was out in the world and
people noticed.
Speaker 2 (13:00):
We got a message from the casting director for Shark Tank.
Speaker 1 (13:05):
Don applied to the show, thinking he'd never get called.
He also filmed his episode, not knowing if it would air.
Some don't, but on the chance that it did, they
were ready.
Speaker 2 (13:15):
So my wife and I and our kids and we
hired friends and family to come and help make all
of the tubes for our Shark Tank airing. I think
I made what I thought would be a year's worth
of inventory, and we sold all of it in a
single month. And I was like, oh boy, we're in
way over our heads.
Speaker 1 (13:32):
Here, and do you think that's because of Shark Tank.
Speaker 2 (13:36):
It was absolutely because of Shark Tank. So that was
the trick is it's like, I don't want to have
more inventory than I need, because I don't want to
get stuck with, you know, two or three years worth
of inventory, but I also want to have enough that
we can handle the wave and ride that wave of publicity.
Speaker 1 (13:53):
And ride the wave they did.
Speaker 2 (13:55):
I remember the weekend our episode aired. I think we
shipped four thousand units. It's in a single day. The
next day I wake up and we have another thousand orders.
We were just laugh crying on the couch in the
living room thinking about how crazy this was, that this
thing took off on us. So that was really the
beginning of the journey. From there, we ran our business
(14:16):
out of the house for a few years, and then
it got to the point where the business was busting
at the seams of that house, and so we moved
it out of the house, sold that house, and moved
into an industrial space.
Speaker 1 (14:27):
Around that time, Don decided to finally commit to nerd
wax full time, so he once again went hunting for
a manufacturer that wouldn't break all of his tubes.
Speaker 2 (14:36):
We had manufacturers that knew how to work with material,
and then we had manufacturers that knew how to work
with a container. But the ones that knew how to
work with a container didn't know how to work with material.
And so what we realized in that process is like,
we have to actually be the manufacturers for a lot
longer if we're going to actually scale this, and we
have to find a scalable manufacturing process in order to
(14:56):
do that.
Speaker 1 (14:57):
Okay, and how did you do that? How did you
go about finding that process?
Speaker 2 (15:02):
A lot of messing up?
Speaker 1 (15:06):
Then done was blessed by the Shark Tank gods. He
got an email from someone who had seen his episode.
Speaker 2 (15:12):
That said, Hey, I made all these filling machines for
Burts bees. I saw you on Shark Tank. Would you
like me to build you a machine? I was like,
where have you been for the last five years? I've
been looking like everywhere for you. He already understands all
of the hard parts about what we're doing, and he's
got this semi automated machine. We bought that machine from him,
(15:34):
custom made, and then it only took two people and
basically four hours to do what it took us six
people in three days to do.
Speaker 1 (15:43):
And just like that, after three years of R and
D for the wax and five years of looking for
a filling machine, NERD wax was scalable. Life was good. Mostly.
Speaker 2 (15:55):
A tornado rips through Nashville right by our house, like
a block away from our house. This tornado rips through.
Speaker 1 (16:02):
This tornado touchdown in East Nashville in March of twenty twenty.
Speaker 2 (16:06):
I hear the tornado ripping through our neighborhood. There's a
church two blocks away. I look down the street and
the steeple from the church is sitting in the middle
of the road. Two weeks later, COVID happens. So we
go from tornado to COVID. I am like sending my
people home and not knowing if we're going to have
(16:28):
a business in the next six months.
Speaker 1 (16:33):
Tornado and COVID aside the shark tank, gods smiled on
Don again. He got a message from a customer who
was using Nerd Wax to seal his mask. He made
a video about it and sales exploded. Don had also
been kicking around the idea of an anti fog product,
foggy mask glasses. Sent them into hyperdrive where Nerd Wax
took him three years. Fog Block, as it came to
(16:55):
be called, was out in just three months.
Speaker 2 (16:59):
And Fog Block just like took off on us. We
came out of twenty twenty riding real high, so we
expanded our warehouse space, we hired a bunch of people,
and we're really just like humming along. And then in
spring of twenty twenty one, the mask mandates lift, and
simultaneous to that, iOS fourteen comes out and our business
(17:20):
just tanks.
Speaker 1 (17:23):
Okay, let's talk about iOS fourteen. Don's right when it's mentioned,
Even today, I've seen entrepreneurs just Wince. So for D
to C brands like nerd wax, online and social media
advertisements are a great way to reach your customers. Some
of that is just organic traffic to your social media profiles,
but for a lot of folks that includes paid ads
(17:44):
and performance marketing. iOS fourteen changed the way that almost
everyone did performance marketing, which is why it was such
a big deal. If you have an iPhone, you've probably
seen a pop up about allowing apps to track your
data usage. For advertisers, this was crucial information. When that
became optional rather than automatic, a lot of folks opted
(18:04):
out and it tanked a ton of digital marketing conversions
for folks all over the place.
Speaker 2 (18:10):
We're spending money on all of the digital platforms social media, Google, Search,
and that digital ad spend is actually very efficient. So
we're spending a dollar, we're making three to five dollars
every time, and we're just focused on top line revenue.
It's like, how many of these things can we sell?
The iOS update comes out, we go from a three
(18:31):
to five ROAS as to a point eight ROAS.
Speaker 1 (18:35):
It's an acronym I should mention is an industry term
that means return on ad spend. It's a key metric
for anyone in performance marketing, and it was a headache
for Don.
Speaker 2 (18:46):
We're losing twenty cents on every dollar that we sell.
I'm at this point spending about seventy thousand dollars a
month on ads. I am bleeding money, and I'm watching
the sales just decline.
Speaker 1 (19:00):
After losing seventy thousand dollars a month, Don decided to
pull the ripcord on ad spend.
Speaker 2 (19:06):
We go to zero dollars in ad spend. I should
have been nurturing the customer base that we had and
not just focused on going out and finding new customers.
It was bleak. It was one of the hardest times
in our business.
Speaker 1 (19:21):
The drastic drop in organic sales led Don to a
startling realization we hadn't.
Speaker 2 (19:27):
Truly built a business. We had just had some fun
products that we were selling and we were doing well,
but we didn't have an actual business.
Speaker 1 (19:35):
Once you pulled it back to the barebones organic sales,
how much had been chopped off.
Speaker 2 (19:39):
Yeah, so I think we did one point seven million
in sales in twenty twenty, then went to one point
two in twenty twenty one. Then we went to eight
hundred thousand in sales in twenty twenty two. So it's
a fifty percent decrease in sales. And we at the
same time that we had just started expanding and increasing
all of our overhead. It was bad. We had basically
had to let everybody go. We had just moved into
(20:02):
a five thousand square foot warehouse. It's literally me and
my brother in law in this giant warehouse. I think
we were making two grand a month.
Speaker 1 (20:11):
Don and his brother in law tighten their belts and
we're desperately looking for anything that would help them survive.
Speaker 2 (20:17):
So back in twenty seventeen, I launched these microfiber claws
to clean your glasses with. We had a pizza, taco
and a unicorn. I had done them, thinking like, these
will be great, and so we launched that and it
was just it was cricket.
Speaker 1 (20:34):
Don originally tried to push them on social media, and
the social media of twenty seventeen was very different than
the social media of today. In twenty seventeen, social media
was prioritizing photos, not videos.
Speaker 2 (20:46):
When I was trying to sell these pizza glasses cloths,
they looked like a slice of pizza, and so you
take a picture of it and you couldn't really tell
what it was. When you're scrolling through Instagram and you
see a slice of pizza, you're just like, oh, it's
a slice of pizza. You didn't realize that it was
a and if you showing it wiping the glasses, you
couldn't tell that it was a slice of pizza. It
was just like a weird colored cloth.
Speaker 1 (21:08):
By the time Don rediscovered the pizza taco cloth in
twenty twenty two, social media was firmly in the land
of video.
Speaker 2 (21:15):
With video and Instagram reels, you could actually see that, hey,
this is what looks like a slice of pizza becomes
a cleaning cloth and then it cleans glasses and it's
like it takes five seconds to show that, and you go,
oh wow, I know exactly what that is.
Speaker 1 (21:29):
The cloths, they were a hit.
Speaker 2 (21:32):
We have three hundred of them and we sold all
of them in a couple days, and I was like,
wait a second, that was unexpected. So then I put
the pizza cloths up. Those selling a couple of days,
So I thought maybe it was something about the time
that I launched this, and not necessarily the product that
I launched.
Speaker 1 (21:48):
Don had recently bought a van, but he sold it
in favor of buying equipment to make more cloths.
Speaker 2 (21:54):
And if people want them, then we'll sell them, and
if people don't want them, we're only out one unit.
We're not out five thousand units. So we standardized our
packaging and we just started making these cloths, and pretty
soon we went from our little prototyping rig to six rigs,
and so it was like the business became a new business.
Speaker 1 (22:13):
Don called this new cloth business Jinkies, which you may
remember from Scooby Doo.
Speaker 2 (22:19):
All of a sudden, people are asking us for different things, right,
so a guy asked us for a slab wag you,
then another guy asked us for a tortilla. We did
about fifty different designs in that year. We took our
Instagram channel from nine thousand users to seventy thousand users,
and our sales we did one hundred thousand Jinkies in
that first year.
Speaker 1 (22:42):
Kathleen Jinkies is going to be stuck in my head
for days.
Speaker 3 (22:46):
Before we talk about that, we have to discuss the
shark in the room. His anecdote about inventory management was
so interesting. You don't want to purchase too much, so
you're sitting on all this excess inventory, and at the
same time, you want to be able to fulfill orders
that come in because you might have this deluge from
all this massive exposure, And so what's the right mix there?
(23:07):
And who would you even go to to ask how much.
Speaker 4 (23:10):
Should I have? There's really no there's no rule book
around it.
Speaker 1 (23:15):
Yeah, I mean on a more toned down basis, that's
what many of our both retailers and manufacturers go through
every holiday season. Right. How big should I bet on
Q four? That's right? Because I've got to order and
or manufacture for Q four, and I you know, I'm
gonna have a marketing plan and I'm gonna push, But
I don't know. I might not be able to sell
it all and have to go on steep discount. I
might run out early and disappoint customers. And it's a
really delicate balance between those two things, right, leaving money
(23:38):
on the table or getting stuck in a bind. I
think this is really interesting. I think there are two
other things that are important themes that come out of it.
One is different products that have different shelf lives. You
know he talked about its is about two years for
nerd wax. The Jinkies are much longer, obviously because they're
just fabric. But you know the rate at which the
fruit rots matters a lot.
Speaker 4 (23:57):
Yeah, yeah, it does.
Speaker 3 (23:59):
And how quickly also is a customer cycling through the
product I would imagine is going to take a year,
year and a half to get through one tube, right,
so you don't have that repeat purchase to also have
that you know, churn that you're looking for in your
business necessarily built in.
Speaker 1 (24:16):
Yeah, that's fair enough. There's a really interesting angle on
the Jinki's business that he's built because he has something
where he can constantly test product market fit before he
invests in manufacturing. You know, he'll crowdsource a new design
from customers, he'll make a few, see how they sell,
and then he'll ramp up production of them. And so
(24:37):
he's constantly testing new designs and he only manufactures what
sells quickly.
Speaker 3 (24:43):
Yeah, this is so good. And with social media too,
you really have no reason not to test in this way.
Speaker 4 (24:50):
You really can.
Speaker 3 (24:50):
Get that feedback quick fast. It's inexpensive. It's not doing
consumer focus groups like we used to do. You know
that cost of fortune. You can get it now through
social in such a powerful way.
Speaker 1 (25:03):
Let's talk a little bit about how he sells his
product and how he distributes it, because some of this
has been a recurring theme on the show, like dependence
on one customer or one channel. But what I thought
was really interesting was I mean, I remember when the
iPhone algorithm changed search engines have done the same with
their algorithms over time, so that can happen from time
to time. But the lesson for me in there, which
(25:25):
I have learned in my career a number of times,
is that paid search marketing is a drug, and it
is very easy to get addicted to that drug. You
can use it, but if you are not at the
same time investing in and monitoring the health of your
organic brand, when the dealer stops selling, you're in trouble.
Speaker 3 (25:44):
It's where most small business owners spend their money, right
as in digital marketing and paid advertising more specifically, and
so many of them in our conversations are thinking more
intensely about building something on borrowed land. You look at Instagram,
you look at Facebook, you look at what we're seeing
now with TikTok. So what do you make of that
(26:07):
building something on a house of cards that could kind
of go away tomorrow versus having your own real estate.
Speaker 1 (26:13):
Well, I think you have to build a mobile home
on someone else's land if you want to take the
analogy really far. And what I mean by that is
that doesn't mean that paid advertising and digital advertising doesn't
have a role. It does, and when you're an unknown brand.
It is how you get discovered. But what I've seen
is because you can tie that sale directly to that investment,
it's easy to, just as I said before, get hooked
(26:34):
on it, and you just keep doubling down and tripling
down and quadrupling down on that. When you do that,
you are attracting lots of one time buyers. You are
not investing in your database of loyal customers, and you're
not building the brand equity that makes people have an
emotional attachment to your product as opposed to a transactional
attachment to your product. So my advice is always it's
(26:57):
fine to use that as a way to sort of
feed the top of the funnel, but you have to
nurture that funnel, and you have to plant the seeds
to finish the analogy on your own ground. And it's
hard to do that a lot of times because the
investment in the brand equity kind of marketing is not
as immediately gratifying. I spent X, I got Y. It's
(27:17):
no I have to spend X, and I have to
spend X again, and maybe I have to spend two X,
and I have to keep doing that overtime and overtime,
But I am building a loyal brand audience that has
an emotional attachment to my product and is willing to
pay for it. It's harder work, but it's stickier. Okay,
let's finish up here with Don. Just like the perfect
(27:39):
wax blend, Don had discovered, he also discovered his buyers
were pretty sticky too.
Speaker 2 (27:44):
I've always wondered how much life is there to this business, like,
are people going to really use something called nerd wax forever?
And it's been ten years and our sales have just
been consistent over time, and so I go, look, there's
obviously a market here and people are using this. Year
over year, SOD gone up in relation to all of
the other products that we've launched. But it's what I
(28:05):
intended for to be initially, which was just a good
core product that you put on the market and just
sells itself.
Speaker 1 (28:11):
Right. But Jinkies are now the other half of your
business essentially, or most of it.
Speaker 2 (28:15):
Yeah, And so now Jinkies has taken up all of
our time. We're going to be a US based manufacturer
of microfiber. That's what we've been working into.
Speaker 1 (28:22):
So I went to visit your factory and you've recently
launched a higher end form of Jinkies, right, Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (28:27):
So we actually launched a line called Secretly Nerdy and
those are like twelve By twelve inch pocket squares that
are also microfiber material from Far Away. It'll look like
a houndstooth pattern, but then if you look close, it's
actually the Star Trek Enterprise. We have one that looks
like the artists from Doctor Who. We have some that
look like Rebel Fighters. They look like a classic pattern
(28:49):
from Far Away. I love the Secretly Nerdy collection. Well,
so I have to.
Speaker 1 (28:53):
Confess that I am a not so closeted Star Trek fan,
and when I came to visit you, I did walk
away with a beautiful Star Trek Enterprise Jinky, which I love. Yeah,
so what's next for nerd Wax. You're growing the Jinky business.
You're going to be a manufacturer. What else is on
the horizon.
Speaker 2 (29:11):
We're currently building out our manufacturing. I see that being
this year and I have no shortage of ideas for
things that we can add to our product lineup.
Speaker 1 (29:19):
All right, so don I want to finish with something
that I ask all the guests who come on The Unshakeables,
which is, you know, running a business is really hard.
If you had one piece of advice for either aspiring
or current business owners out there, what would it be.
Speaker 2 (29:36):
Work harder, work smarter. And I see those two things
as like pedals on your bicycle, and so working hard
is where you start. You just go out and you
do it, and you don't know how to do it.
You just go out and you work hard and you
make it happen. But that will only get you so far, right, like,
you get to the end of the crank, and then
(29:58):
you got to work smarter, and you get more efficient,
and you learn as you go and you make less mistakes,
and then that only gets you so far. You get
to the end of that crank, and then you have
to work harder again.
Speaker 1 (30:09):
Don, It's been an absolute pleasure hearing your story. Thank
you so much for being on the show.
Speaker 2 (30:13):
I appreciate it, Ben, thanks for having me.
Speaker 3 (30:16):
I just find it so encouraging to see someone like
Don who had this crushing realization in twenty twenty two
that he hadn't actually built a business, he just had
a product line to fast forward, someone who now has
a brand and his business, this brand of nerds, you know,
the celebration of nerds and nerds uniting and coming together.
(30:38):
Brand marketing increasingly has fallen more and more by the wayside,
where people are really not focused on brand and they're
more focused on performance marketing. What's my immediate ROI? How
am I driving my bottom line? It's this churn and burn,
and it's really important not to lose sight of how
important brand is because it helps you weather those storms too.
Speaker 1 (30:58):
I think the other thing that I took away, he
went into it with a product that really wasn't going
to build the business ultimately, right, he said it himself,
it was an anchor product. I think he picked a
niche product, but not a niche segment, because you know
what percent of the population wears some form of eyeglasses.
It's quite high. So I think he picked a segment
(31:21):
as opposed to a product. I think nerd wax is
a niche product. I don't think iwear accessories are a
niche segment. But I would say, you know, when you
are looking at what you want to do, you need
to look at the addressable market that is in front
of you and decide if that addressable market fits with
your business. Goals. And I say that because if you
talk to venture capitalists who are investing in high growth
(31:43):
tech companies, the first thing they want to see is
a gigantic addressable market. But they're looking for home runs only.
That's the business model, right, They're not looking for singles
up the middle. But if your goal isn't to build
something that you can sell for you know, a huge
amount of money, but your goal is to be able
to generate a business of X size, there might be
plenty in the market for you. So understanding the addressable
(32:04):
market relative to your ambitions for the business and the
competitive space around that is what's important.
Speaker 3 (32:10):
Yeah, and it feels like he has a really healthy business.
It's holding steady. He's got a hero product that's doing
consistently well. He's got great margins on the business. There's
not a whole lot of competition.
Speaker 1 (32:21):
What you didn't hear, though, is when I went to
visit him, I mean I walked in and I said,
this might be the happiest place I've been to in
a long time. His giant, one hundred and twenty pound
rottweiler came lumbering over to me and nuzzled up against
me to be pet. Everyone in the factory looked entirely
happy to be there. It was like a chill space.
(32:42):
They said, yeah, our first priority running this business is
to just enjoy ourselves. He didn't say my first priority
is to sell this for a gajillion dollars. Now, I
think he needs to make a good living on it.
He's got a family, and so it's not that he
doesn't care about that. But there were clearly lots of
things they were trying to balance. And so I always
encourage people in your life, whether you work for someone
else or you start your own business or anything in between.
(33:03):
I encourage you to know what your why is and
why you're doing it and what you want to get
out of it. Because you know, his wife and brother
in law work in the business, and they've clearly found
something that works for them and their family.
Speaker 4 (33:14):
That's why I love this business, because it like he's
so lovable.
Speaker 1 (33:17):
Yeah, he's great.
Speaker 3 (33:18):
I also love that the business has really lived and
breathed what is so emblematic of most small businesses, which
is it's this roller coaster ride and you think you're
down and out, the business is leveling up year over
year over year, and then all of a sudden, it
tanks and you're on your knees wondering what you're going
to do. And then you find a new product and
(33:41):
that has life to it, and then you have this
kind of great resurgence and you're up for air again
and you're making big bets, and I just I love
everything about it.
Speaker 4 (33:52):
I love everything about the spirit.
Speaker 3 (33:54):
Of this business and what he's done and how courageously
he's done it too, while keeping a sense of humor
about it all.
Speaker 1 (34:01):
Yeah, he's got a terrific thing going.
Speaker 4 (34:02):
Yeah, he was a good pick.
Speaker 1 (34:03):
Awesome, Kathleen, thanks for being here today, Thanks for having me,
Thanks so much for listening to this episode of The Unshakeables.
If you liked this episode, please rate and review it
next week. Our guest is one of the most energetic
people I've ever met. Not only did she start a
company and run a foundation that's not even her day job.
(34:25):
She's a professional athlete.
Speaker 4 (34:28):
You keep going like you bet on yourself.
Speaker 3 (34:29):
You keep going, you keep fighting, you keep competing until
eventually you get to where you want to be.
Speaker 1 (34:37):
I'm Ben Walter, and this is The Unshakeables from Chase
for Business and Ruby Studio from iHeartMedia. We'll see you
back here soon.
Don Hejny was just an average guy with an average problem. His glasses kept sliding down his nose and he was determined to find a solution. Three long years of product testing later he finally had his surf wax inspired, anti-slip glasses wax nailed down.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
I'd raise sixty thousand dollars. I now had our first
production run of nerd wax. I was like, this is amazing.
Everything's going great.
Speaker 1 (00:32):
Don got that first shipment in and it was so
exciting finally seeing all of his hard work pay off.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
And I open up the box and every tube is breaking.
Like you go to twist the nerd wax out of
the tube, and every single tube is just breaking. The
nerd wax doesn't protract out of the tube, The little
turning mechanism breaks in your hands. And I was like,
how many of these do we have? I think our
first initial order was five thousand units.
Speaker 1 (01:02):
And there was nothing Don could.
Speaker 3 (01:03):
Do with them.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
Welcome to The Unsheakables from Chase for Business and Ruby
Studio from iHeartMedia. I'm Ben Walter, CEO of Chase for Business.
On The Unshakeables, we're sharing the daring moments of small
business owners facing their crisis points and telling the stories
of how they got through it. Today we're talking to nerds,
which makes me feel very comfortable. But I'm also talking
(01:29):
to Kathleen Griffith definitely not a nerd. Kathleen, welcome back.
Speaker 2 (01:34):
Ben.
Speaker 3 (01:34):
Before you say anything else, I want to say how
great of a name is nerd Wax for a company.
Speaker 4 (01:39):
It's fun.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
Don's a fun guy, and I'm excited for this story.
I love this small business. And I also have to
say I'm a not so secret Star Trek fan.
Speaker 3 (01:47):
Yes, I do know that about you. Does that mean
there will be a Star Trek mentioned today?
Speaker 1 (01:53):
Absolutely? The company we're talking about today is very invested
in quote unquote nerd culture.
Speaker 3 (01:58):
Ay yes, Okay, Well, well I'm excited to see how
we get from surf Wax to Star Trek.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
All will be made clear in a moment on today's episode.
Nerd Wax from Nashville, Tennessee. Don officially welcome to The Unshakeables.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
Thanks Ben.
Speaker 1 (02:19):
Don grew up using surf wax. He's from California, and
he's a nerd. But it took a while to put
those two together.
Speaker 2 (02:26):
I used to be a touring audio engineer, I did
the Miley Cyrus Best of Both Worlds tour. I did
a bunch of radio Disney stuff for a while, so
I toured with Everlife. We did a run with the
Jonas brothers, worked for Keith Urban for a bit. I
did Julianne Huff for a bit.
Speaker 1 (02:42):
He moved through the Nashville touring circuit, and week after
week he was out on the road and a week
after week he had the same issue, namely sweat.
Speaker 2 (02:52):
So we would do these outdoor concerts and festivals in
the summer, and my glasses were always all over the place.
I had tried different solutions like hooks or bands and straps,
and none of those worked for me because I wanted
something that wouldn't change the look or feel of my glasses.
So I wanted to be able to wear my glasses
as normal, but then also not have them slide. I
(03:13):
just realized, like, hey, if I could make something that
would be hydrophobic, so it would block the sweat on
your glasses and would stick to your nose pads. I
kind of thought surfers use wax on their boards in
the water to give them extra friction. I wonder if
I could make the same thing, but make a cosmetic
grade so that your glasses wouldn't slide your on your nose.
Speaker 1 (03:33):
Surf wax, for the non surfers in the room, is
a super sticky wax that comes in bar form. You
put it on the surfboard to help you get a
better grip on the board, and crucially it's made for surfboards,
not glasses.
Speaker 2 (03:46):
The first time I actually tried this and I scratched
the glasses, and then I tried a different surf wax
and it made my skin break out, and I was like,
I'm going to have to actually formulate something with your
skin in mind.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
While Don was trying to find the perfect formula for
cosmetic grade surf wax that wasn't really surf wax, he
was still a full time audio engineer. He'd be out
on the road during the week and come home on
the weekends.
Speaker 2 (04:12):
I would like make a batch in our kitchen and
then I would take it out on the road. I
would see if it worked or if it didn't work.
If I had had like a little touring kitchen with
me on the road, it probably wouldn't have taken three years.
But it was really just a side hustle I wanted
to make it for myself, like I wanted to use it,
and because I wanted to use it, I was willing
to just do whatever it took to make it.
Speaker 1 (04:34):
That was three years of touring and wax that was
too sticky or not sticky enough. A lot of people
would have given up by now, but Don approached nerd
wax the same way he approached his career in music.
Speaker 2 (04:46):
My kind of north Star has always been to be creative,
the creative process. That's what I love. Taking the seed
of an idea, then making that and then seeing it
happen in reality. It's magic. There's no other word for
it other than it feels like alchemy. It feels like, Oh,
(05:06):
I thought of this thing, and now here it is,
in real life, right in front of me, and it
is the coolest thing. It's just magic.
Speaker 1 (05:14):
The magic it paid off.
Speaker 2 (05:17):
I arrived at the formula that is still the formula
for nerd wax today, and so that's beeswax, coconut oil
and gum resin. It's a really simple, all natural formulation.
Speaker 1 (05:27):
But by the time he had his formula down, ironically enough,
he didn't really need it anymore. He had his wife
and three kids, and he was ready to leave life
on the road and be with his family.
Speaker 2 (05:37):
I get Nerd Wax to the place where I feel like, Okay,
I have a product here. I've given it out to
friends and family, and I've established that it works. People
like it. They're asking me for it. But I have
this problem, which is I don't have labels for nerd Wax,
and it stops me from handing them out.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
Don's worry about packaging was understandable. It's hard to scale
a product only available in unmarked tubes.
Speaker 2 (06:07):
I needed five grand to do a first run of labels,
and I didn't have the cash. I also didn't want
to keep spreading it around without it looking like something.
I wanted the world to see.
Speaker 1 (06:21):
What happened next. It's straight out of a country song.
Speaker 2 (06:26):
Right at the same time is when I kind of
had this two week period where both of our cars
broke down. My wife broke her ankle, I lost my job.
Our landlord called and he wouldn't renew our lease. That
was the moment that I had to decide if I
was going to stay on the road and keep on
that course, or if I was going to make a
change and do something different.
Speaker 1 (06:48):
Don decided to make a change. He needed a way
to provide for his family, even if it meant putting
his creative projects away for a while.
Speaker 2 (06:56):
I got a job working for Dave Ramsey in Nashville.
Speaker 1 (07:00):
Dave Ramsey, for those of you who don't know, is
a financial advisor based out of Nashville, Tennessee. He's best
known for his no nonsense advice on his radio show
and podcast, and his cash focused debt payoff methods.
Speaker 2 (07:13):
When I was at Dave Ramsey and I was producing
the Entrepreneur Leadership podcast, and my job was like to
read through these business books, and I was doing a
case study on how to start a business with no debt.
I had researched a bunch of kickstarters, and I thought, Man,
what if I just did a kickstarter for one of
my ideas, Like just see if there's product market fit.
So twenty fourteen is when I launched my kickstarter for nerd.
Speaker 1 (07:34):
Wax Don set a goal of raising five thousand dollars
to produce the labels of his dreams.
Speaker 2 (07:40):
By noon on the first day of the campaign, we'd
reached our five thousand dollars goal, and then by the
end of the thirty day campaign, we had raised over
sixty thousand dollars.
Speaker 1 (07:50):
Don had split his campaign into two timelines. The first
round of backers would get theirs in September, the others
later that fall. He decided on doing the first run
in his house and partnering with the manufacturer for the second.
Speaker 2 (08:03):
When we first started, we were filling into lip balm tubes,
and lip balm tubes were a great medium at the
time because they were really easy to find. Lip Balm
tubes are made for lip balm. They're made for a
greasy substance, and I was putting this hard, tacky substance inside,
and so what would happen is the mechanism that you
twist at the bottom of the tube to get the
lip balm to come out, that mechanism would break.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
Don and his wife managed to get the first batch
fixed and sent out for the next order. Don found
a manufacturer who could solve the broken lip balm tube issue.
Speaker 2 (08:37):
We did some tests with them. Everything looked great. They
sent me a batch of nerd wax to test out,
and they said, hey, we noticed there's like a few
issues with some of these tubes. Can you try them out?
And so they sent me a box of them, and
I opened up the box and every tube is breaking.
All five thousand units come off the line and they're
(08:58):
just broken.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
Same issue as before, but this time on a much
larger scale.
Speaker 2 (09:05):
I was asking the manufacturing partner what they could do
to fix it, and they were like, this is your thing,
We're just filling it for you.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
Wow. And did you ever get money back for the
bad run.
Speaker 2 (09:16):
They made a seat that one.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
Oh that's brutal. Yeah, it was brutal, Kathleen, What a
terrific story that is, isn't it.
Speaker 4 (09:27):
Nerds rule the world.
Speaker 1 (09:28):
Nerds do rule the world. He even put in the name.
Speaker 4 (09:30):
Of his business avenge of the Nerds.
Speaker 1 (09:31):
I mean, that was one of my favorites back in
the I have to say that was one of my
favorites because we have lots of different types of businesses
on The Unshakeables, I have a real affinity for people
who make stuff. Partly is my patriotic streak of wanting
to manufacture in America, but part of it is also
I have a personal proclivity for that. I think it's
(09:53):
super interesting when people create a physical good that didn't
exist before. But on the flip side. The manufacturing businesses
are typically capital intensive businesses, right, Like, it's not like
consulting where if your cost is you or the people
and you can flex them. You're talking about equipment, you're
talking about research and design. This is a different animal.
Speaker 4 (10:12):
Right, Ain't that the truth? Yeah, it really is. It's
not for the faint of heart.
Speaker 3 (10:17):
You know, he was talking about it being left with
five thousand units. I mean it's the stakes are real.
The stakes are really real, and.
Speaker 1 (10:24):
It's never efficient to manufacture in small quantities or rarely efficient.
I should say. It means you're always taking that inventory
risk when you try something new. And how do you
feel about things like crowdfunding in terms of getting something started.
It's a brilliant platform because it really does two things.
It gives you essentially not free, but discounted marketing, and
it gives you advanced cash flow for your manufacturing process,
(10:46):
right because people pay now and get later.
Speaker 2 (10:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (10:49):
I think a lot of times people forget about Kickstarter
or it's not really top of mind. But it makes
so much sense because you're also seeing what is the
real legitimate market appetite for your product. I think a
lot of founders don't want that negative feedback. There's a
part of them that doesn't want to be told there's
no there there. But I think it's a great way
(11:11):
to test the waters and see if it works.
Speaker 1 (11:13):
Yeah, I'd rather find out I don't have a product
market fit before I spend the money than after I
spend the money. Are there any lessons you've seen people
learn with regard to negotiating with manufacturers, sourcing manufacturers. I mean,
you must see your clients go through this all the time. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (11:28):
The biggest issue is seeing people moving from home manufacturing
doing it themselves, you know, or with friends and family
in this very labor intensive way, to then figuring out
how to get a manufacturer on board. So there was
an entrepreneur that I was advising, she has a skincare business,
she's doing it at home, had a bad experience like
(11:49):
Don did with a manufacturer, and so went back home.
So you see this kind of advance retreat, advance retreat,
and the business shrinks or expands as a result of that.
Finding the right manufacture is tough and it's a long process.
I think people get very overwhelmed by everything you need
to do. Once you have an idea, and to break
(12:10):
it down really simply, it's you've got an idea right
step one. Step two is you've got to do your
customer research, which is easier now than ever because you
can do it in social media and all these other places.
Step three is to create a prototype, a minimally viable product.
Step four is to validate that with the market so
product market fit. And step five is then to place
(12:31):
your orders. And I think that's the piece we can't
underscore enough in hearing this too. It can take years,
and it doesn't mean your product isn't scalable. It just
means it's going to take time to find the right partner.
Speaker 1 (12:46):
Okay, let's get back to Don. After the broken tube debacle,
Don still worked for Dave Ramsey and nerd Wax was
still in the lip balm tubes for better or worse.
But now nerd Wax was out in the world and
people noticed.
Speaker 2 (13:00):
We got a message from the casting director for Shark Tank.
Speaker 1 (13:05):
Don applied to the show, thinking he'd never get called.
He also filmed his episode, not knowing if it would air.
Some don't, but on the chance that it did, they
were ready.
Speaker 2 (13:15):
So my wife and I and our kids and we
hired friends and family to come and help make all
of the tubes for our Shark Tank airing. I think
I made what I thought would be a year's worth
of inventory, and we sold all of it in a
single month. And I was like, oh boy, we're in
way over our heads.
Speaker 1 (13:32):
Here, and do you think that's because of Shark Tank.
Speaker 2 (13:36):
It was absolutely because of Shark Tank. So that was
the trick is it's like, I don't want to have
more inventory than I need, because I don't want to
get stuck with, you know, two or three years worth
of inventory, but I also want to have enough that
we can handle the wave and ride that wave of publicity.
Speaker 1 (13:53):
And ride the wave they did.
Speaker 2 (13:55):
I remember the weekend our episode aired. I think we
shipped four thousand units. It's in a single day. The
next day I wake up and we have another thousand orders.
We were just laugh crying on the couch in the
living room thinking about how crazy this was, that this
thing took off on us. So that was really the
beginning of the journey. From there, we ran our business
(14:16):
out of the house for a few years, and then
it got to the point where the business was busting
at the seams of that house, and so we moved
it out of the house, sold that house, and moved
into an industrial space.
Speaker 1 (14:27):
Around that time, Don decided to finally commit to nerd
wax full time, so he once again went hunting for
a manufacturer that wouldn't break all of his tubes.
Speaker 2 (14:36):
We had manufacturers that knew how to work with material,
and then we had manufacturers that knew how to work
with a container. But the ones that knew how to
work with a container didn't know how to work with material.
And so what we realized in that process is like,
we have to actually be the manufacturers for a lot
longer if we're going to actually scale this, and we
have to find a scalable manufacturing process in order to
(14:56):
do that.
Speaker 1 (14:57):
Okay, and how did you do that? How did you
go about finding that process?
Speaker 2 (15:02):
A lot of messing up?
Speaker 1 (15:06):
Then done was blessed by the Shark Tank gods. He
got an email from someone who had seen his episode.
Speaker 2 (15:12):
That said, Hey, I made all these filling machines for
Burts bees. I saw you on Shark Tank. Would you
like me to build you a machine? I was like,
where have you been for the last five years? I've
been looking like everywhere for you. He already understands all
of the hard parts about what we're doing, and he's
got this semi automated machine. We bought that machine from him,
(15:34):
custom made, and then it only took two people and
basically four hours to do what it took us six
people in three days to do.
Speaker 1 (15:43):
And just like that, after three years of R and
D for the wax and five years of looking for
a filling machine, NERD wax was scalable. Life was good. Mostly.
Speaker 2 (15:55):
A tornado rips through Nashville right by our house, like
a block away from our house. This tornado rips through.
Speaker 1 (16:02):
This tornado touchdown in East Nashville in March of twenty twenty.
Speaker 2 (16:06):
I hear the tornado ripping through our neighborhood. There's a
church two blocks away. I look down the street and
the steeple from the church is sitting in the middle
of the road. Two weeks later, COVID happens. So we
go from tornado to COVID. I am like sending my
people home and not knowing if we're going to have
(16:28):
a business in the next six months.
Speaker 1 (16:33):
Tornado and COVID aside the shark tank, gods smiled on
Don again. He got a message from a customer who
was using Nerd Wax to seal his mask. He made
a video about it and sales exploded. Don had also
been kicking around the idea of an anti fog product,
foggy mask glasses. Sent them into hyperdrive where Nerd Wax
took him three years. Fog Block, as it came to
(16:55):
be called, was out in just three months.
Speaker 2 (16:59):
And Fog Block just like took off on us. We
came out of twenty twenty riding real high, so we
expanded our warehouse space, we hired a bunch of people,
and we're really just like humming along. And then in
spring of twenty twenty one, the mask mandates lift, and
simultaneous to that, iOS fourteen comes out and our business
(17:20):
just tanks.
Speaker 1 (17:23):
Okay, let's talk about iOS fourteen. Don's right when it's mentioned,
Even today, I've seen entrepreneurs just Wince. So for D
to C brands like nerd wax, online and social media
advertisements are a great way to reach your customers. Some
of that is just organic traffic to your social media profiles,
but for a lot of folks that includes paid ads
(17:44):
and performance marketing. iOS fourteen changed the way that almost
everyone did performance marketing, which is why it was such
a big deal. If you have an iPhone, you've probably
seen a pop up about allowing apps to track your
data usage. For advertisers, this was crucial information. When that
became optional rather than automatic, a lot of folks opted
(18:04):
out and it tanked a ton of digital marketing conversions
for folks all over the place.
Speaker 2 (18:10):
We're spending money on all of the digital platforms social media, Google, Search,
and that digital ad spend is actually very efficient. So
we're spending a dollar, we're making three to five dollars
every time, and we're just focused on top line revenue.
It's like, how many of these things can we sell?
The iOS update comes out, we go from a three
(18:31):
to five ROAS as to a point eight ROAS.
Speaker 1 (18:35):
It's an acronym I should mention is an industry term
that means return on ad spend. It's a key metric
for anyone in performance marketing, and it was a headache
for Don.
Speaker 2 (18:46):
We're losing twenty cents on every dollar that we sell.
I'm at this point spending about seventy thousand dollars a
month on ads. I am bleeding money, and I'm watching
the sales just decline.
Speaker 1 (19:00):
After losing seventy thousand dollars a month, Don decided to
pull the ripcord on ad spend.
Speaker 2 (19:06):
We go to zero dollars in ad spend. I should
have been nurturing the customer base that we had and
not just focused on going out and finding new customers.
It was bleak. It was one of the hardest times
in our business.
Speaker 1 (19:21):
The drastic drop in organic sales led Don to a
startling realization we hadn't.
Speaker 2 (19:27):
Truly built a business. We had just had some fun
products that we were selling and we were doing well,
but we didn't have an actual business.
Speaker 1 (19:35):
Once you pulled it back to the barebones organic sales,
how much had been chopped off.
Speaker 2 (19:39):
Yeah, so I think we did one point seven million
in sales in twenty twenty, then went to one point
two in twenty twenty one. Then we went to eight
hundred thousand in sales in twenty twenty two. So it's
a fifty percent decrease in sales. And we at the
same time that we had just started expanding and increasing
all of our overhead. It was bad. We had basically
had to let everybody go. We had just moved into
(20:02):
a five thousand square foot warehouse. It's literally me and
my brother in law in this giant warehouse. I think
we were making two grand a month.
Speaker 1 (20:11):
Don and his brother in law tighten their belts and
we're desperately looking for anything that would help them survive.
Speaker 2 (20:17):
So back in twenty seventeen, I launched these microfiber claws
to clean your glasses with. We had a pizza, taco
and a unicorn. I had done them, thinking like, these
will be great, and so we launched that and it
was just it was cricket.
Speaker 1 (20:34):
Don originally tried to push them on social media, and
the social media of twenty seventeen was very different than
the social media of today. In twenty seventeen, social media
was prioritizing photos, not videos.
Speaker 2 (20:46):
When I was trying to sell these pizza glasses cloths,
they looked like a slice of pizza, and so you
take a picture of it and you couldn't really tell
what it was. When you're scrolling through Instagram and you
see a slice of pizza, you're just like, oh, it's
a slice of pizza. You didn't realize that it was
a and if you showing it wiping the glasses, you
couldn't tell that it was a slice of pizza. It
was just like a weird colored cloth.
Speaker 1 (21:08):
By the time Don rediscovered the pizza taco cloth in
twenty twenty two, social media was firmly in the land
of video.
Speaker 2 (21:15):
With video and Instagram reels, you could actually see that, hey,
this is what looks like a slice of pizza becomes
a cleaning cloth and then it cleans glasses and it's
like it takes five seconds to show that, and you go,
oh wow, I know exactly what that is.
Speaker 1 (21:29):
The cloths, they were a hit.
Speaker 2 (21:32):
We have three hundred of them and we sold all
of them in a couple days, and I was like,
wait a second, that was unexpected. So then I put
the pizza cloths up. Those selling a couple of days,
So I thought maybe it was something about the time
that I launched this, and not necessarily the product that
I launched.
Speaker 1 (21:48):
Don had recently bought a van, but he sold it
in favor of buying equipment to make more cloths.
Speaker 2 (21:54):
And if people want them, then we'll sell them, and
if people don't want them, we're only out one unit.
We're not out five thousand units. So we standardized our
packaging and we just started making these cloths, and pretty
soon we went from our little prototyping rig to six rigs,
and so it was like the business became a new business.
Speaker 1 (22:13):
Don called this new cloth business Jinkies, which you may
remember from Scooby Doo.
Speaker 2 (22:19):
All of a sudden, people are asking us for different things, right,
so a guy asked us for a slab wag you,
then another guy asked us for a tortilla. We did
about fifty different designs in that year. We took our
Instagram channel from nine thousand users to seventy thousand users,
and our sales we did one hundred thousand Jinkies in
that first year.
Speaker 1 (22:42):
Kathleen Jinkies is going to be stuck in my head
for days.
Speaker 3 (22:46):
Before we talk about that, we have to discuss the
shark in the room. His anecdote about inventory management was
so interesting. You don't want to purchase too much, so
you're sitting on all this excess inventory, and at the
same time, you want to be able to fulfill orders
that come in because you might have this deluge from
all this massive exposure, And so what's the right mix there?
(23:07):
And who would you even go to to ask how much.
Speaker 4 (23:10):
Should I have? There's really no there's no rule book
around it.
Speaker 1 (23:15):
Yeah, I mean on a more toned down basis, that's
what many of our both retailers and manufacturers go through
every holiday season. Right. How big should I bet on
Q four? That's right? Because I've got to order and
or manufacture for Q four, and I you know, I'm
gonna have a marketing plan and I'm gonna push, But
I don't know. I might not be able to sell
it all and have to go on steep discount. I
might run out early and disappoint customers. And it's a
really delicate balance between those two things, right, leaving money
(23:38):
on the table or getting stuck in a bind. I
think this is really interesting. I think there are two
other things that are important themes that come out of it.
One is different products that have different shelf lives. You
know he talked about its is about two years for
nerd wax. The Jinkies are much longer, obviously because they're
just fabric. But you know the rate at which the
fruit rots matters a lot.
Speaker 4 (23:57):
Yeah, yeah, it does.
Speaker 3 (23:59):
And how quickly also is a customer cycling through the
product I would imagine is going to take a year,
year and a half to get through one tube, right,
so you don't have that repeat purchase to also have
that you know, churn that you're looking for in your
business necessarily built in.
Speaker 1 (24:16):
Yeah, that's fair enough. There's a really interesting angle on
the Jinki's business that he's built because he has something
where he can constantly test product market fit before he
invests in manufacturing. You know, he'll crowdsource a new design
from customers, he'll make a few, see how they sell,
and then he'll ramp up production of them. And so
(24:37):
he's constantly testing new designs and he only manufactures what
sells quickly.
Speaker 3 (24:43):
Yeah, this is so good. And with social media too,
you really have no reason not to test in this way.
Speaker 4 (24:50):
You really can.
Speaker 3 (24:50):
Get that feedback quick fast. It's inexpensive. It's not doing
consumer focus groups like we used to do. You know
that cost of fortune. You can get it now through
social in such a powerful way.
Speaker 1 (25:03):
Let's talk a little bit about how he sells his
product and how he distributes it, because some of this
has been a recurring theme on the show, like dependence
on one customer or one channel. But what I thought
was really interesting was I mean, I remember when the
iPhone algorithm changed search engines have done the same with
their algorithms over time, so that can happen from time
to time. But the lesson for me in there, which
(25:25):
I have learned in my career a number of times,
is that paid search marketing is a drug, and it
is very easy to get addicted to that drug. You
can use it, but if you are not at the
same time investing in and monitoring the health of your
organic brand, when the dealer stops selling, you're in trouble.
Speaker 3 (25:44):
It's where most small business owners spend their money, right
as in digital marketing and paid advertising more specifically, and
so many of them in our conversations are thinking more
intensely about building something on borrowed land. You look at Instagram,
you look at Facebook, you look at what we're seeing
now with TikTok. So what do you make of that
(26:07):
building something on a house of cards that could kind
of go away tomorrow versus having your own real estate.
Speaker 1 (26:13):
Well, I think you have to build a mobile home
on someone else's land if you want to take the
analogy really far. And what I mean by that is
that doesn't mean that paid advertising and digital advertising doesn't
have a role. It does, and when you're an unknown brand.
It is how you get discovered. But what I've seen
is because you can tie that sale directly to that investment,
it's easy to, just as I said before, get hooked
(26:34):
on it, and you just keep doubling down and tripling
down and quadrupling down on that. When you do that,
you are attracting lots of one time buyers. You are
not investing in your database of loyal customers, and you're
not building the brand equity that makes people have an
emotional attachment to your product as opposed to a transactional
attachment to your product. So my advice is always it's
(26:57):
fine to use that as a way to sort of
feed the top of the funnel, but you have to
nurture that funnel, and you have to plant the seeds
to finish the analogy on your own ground. And it's
hard to do that a lot of times because the
investment in the brand equity kind of marketing is not
as immediately gratifying. I spent X, I got Y. It's
(27:17):
no I have to spend X, and I have to
spend X again, and maybe I have to spend two X,
and I have to keep doing that overtime and overtime,
But I am building a loyal brand audience that has
an emotional attachment to my product and is willing to
pay for it. It's harder work, but it's stickier. Okay,
let's finish up here with Don. Just like the perfect
(27:39):
wax blend, Don had discovered, he also discovered his buyers
were pretty sticky too.
Speaker 2 (27:44):
I've always wondered how much life is there to this business, like,
are people going to really use something called nerd wax forever?
And it's been ten years and our sales have just
been consistent over time, and so I go, look, there's
obviously a market here and people are using this. Year
over year, SOD gone up in relation to all of
the other products that we've launched. But it's what I
(28:05):
intended for to be initially, which was just a good
core product that you put on the market and just
sells itself.
Speaker 1 (28:11):
Right. But Jinkies are now the other half of your
business essentially, or most of it.
Speaker 2 (28:15):
Yeah, And so now Jinkies has taken up all of
our time. We're going to be a US based manufacturer
of microfiber. That's what we've been working into.
Speaker 1 (28:22):
So I went to visit your factory and you've recently
launched a higher end form of Jinkies, right, Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (28:27):
So we actually launched a line called Secretly Nerdy and
those are like twelve By twelve inch pocket squares that
are also microfiber material from Far Away. It'll look like
a houndstooth pattern, but then if you look close, it's
actually the Star Trek Enterprise. We have one that looks
like the artists from Doctor Who. We have some that
look like Rebel Fighters. They look like a classic pattern
(28:49):
from Far Away. I love the Secretly Nerdy collection. Well,
so I have to.
Speaker 1 (28:53):
Confess that I am a not so closeted Star Trek fan,
and when I came to visit you, I did walk
away with a beautiful Star Trek Enterprise Jinky, which I love. Yeah,
so what's next for nerd Wax. You're growing the Jinky business.
You're going to be a manufacturer. What else is on
the horizon.
Speaker 2 (29:11):
We're currently building out our manufacturing. I see that being
this year and I have no shortage of ideas for
things that we can add to our product lineup.
Speaker 1 (29:19):
All right, so don I want to finish with something
that I ask all the guests who come on The Unshakeables,
which is, you know, running a business is really hard.
If you had one piece of advice for either aspiring
or current business owners out there, what would it be.
Speaker 2 (29:36):
Work harder, work smarter. And I see those two things
as like pedals on your bicycle, and so working hard
is where you start. You just go out and you
do it, and you don't know how to do it.
You just go out and you work hard and you
make it happen. But that will only get you so far, right, like,
you get to the end of the crank, and then
(29:58):
you got to work smarter, and you get more efficient,
and you learn as you go and you make less mistakes,
and then that only gets you so far. You get
to the end of that crank, and then you have
to work harder again.
Speaker 1 (30:09):
Don, It's been an absolute pleasure hearing your story. Thank
you so much for being on the show.
Speaker 2 (30:13):
I appreciate it, Ben, thanks for having me.
Speaker 3 (30:16):
I just find it so encouraging to see someone like
Don who had this crushing realization in twenty twenty two
that he hadn't actually built a business, he just had
a product line to fast forward, someone who now has
a brand and his business, this brand of nerds, you know,
the celebration of nerds and nerds uniting and coming together.
(30:38):
Brand marketing increasingly has fallen more and more by the wayside,
where people are really not focused on brand and they're
more focused on performance marketing. What's my immediate ROI? How
am I driving my bottom line? It's this churn and burn,
and it's really important not to lose sight of how
important brand is because it helps you weather those storms too.
Speaker 1 (30:58):
I think the other thing that I took away, he
went into it with a product that really wasn't going
to build the business ultimately, right, he said it himself,
it was an anchor product. I think he picked a
niche product, but not a niche segment, because you know
what percent of the population wears some form of eyeglasses.
It's quite high. So I think he picked a segment
(31:21):
as opposed to a product. I think nerd wax is
a niche product. I don't think iwear accessories are a
niche segment. But I would say, you know, when you
are looking at what you want to do, you need
to look at the addressable market that is in front
of you and decide if that addressable market fits with
your business. Goals. And I say that because if you
talk to venture capitalists who are investing in high growth
(31:43):
tech companies, the first thing they want to see is
a gigantic addressable market. But they're looking for home runs only.
That's the business model, right, They're not looking for singles
up the middle. But if your goal isn't to build
something that you can sell for you know, a huge
amount of money, but your goal is to be able
to generate a business of X size, there might be
plenty in the market for you. So understanding the addressable
(32:04):
market relative to your ambitions for the business and the
competitive space around that is what's important.
Speaker 3 (32:10):
Yeah, and it feels like he has a really healthy business.
It's holding steady. He's got a hero product that's doing
consistently well. He's got great margins on the business. There's
not a whole lot of competition.
Speaker 1 (32:21):
What you didn't hear, though, is when I went to
visit him, I mean I walked in and I said,
this might be the happiest place I've been to in
a long time. His giant, one hundred and twenty pound
rottweiler came lumbering over to me and nuzzled up against
me to be pet. Everyone in the factory looked entirely
happy to be there. It was like a chill space.
(32:42):
They said, yeah, our first priority running this business is
to just enjoy ourselves. He didn't say my first priority
is to sell this for a gajillion dollars. Now, I
think he needs to make a good living on it.
He's got a family, and so it's not that he
doesn't care about that. But there were clearly lots of
things they were trying to balance. And so I always
encourage people in your life, whether you work for someone
else or you start your own business or anything in between.
(33:03):
I encourage you to know what your why is and
why you're doing it and what you want to get
out of it. Because you know, his wife and brother
in law work in the business, and they've clearly found
something that works for them and their family.
Speaker 4 (33:14):
That's why I love this business, because it like he's
so lovable.
Speaker 1 (33:17):
Yeah, he's great.
Speaker 3 (33:18):
I also love that the business has really lived and
breathed what is so emblematic of most small businesses, which
is it's this roller coaster ride and you think you're
down and out, the business is leveling up year over
year over year, and then all of a sudden, it
tanks and you're on your knees wondering what you're going
to do. And then you find a new product and
(33:41):
that has life to it, and then you have this
kind of great resurgence and you're up for air again
and you're making big bets, and I just I love
everything about it.
Speaker 4 (33:52):
I love everything about the spirit.
Speaker 3 (33:54):
Of this business and what he's done and how courageously
he's done it too, while keeping a sense of humor
about it all.
Speaker 1 (34:01):
Yeah, he's got a terrific thing going.
Speaker 4 (34:02):
Yeah, he was a good pick.
Speaker 1 (34:03):
Awesome, Kathleen, thanks for being here today, Thanks for having me,
Thanks so much for listening to this episode of The Unshakeables.
If you liked this episode, please rate and review it
next week. Our guest is one of the most energetic
people I've ever met. Not only did she start a
company and run a foundation that's not even her day job.
(34:25):
She's a professional athlete.
Speaker 4 (34:28):
You keep going like you bet on yourself.
Speaker 3 (34:29):
You keep going, you keep fighting, you keep competing until
eventually you get to where you want to be.
Speaker 1 (34:37):
I'm Ben Walter, and this is The Unshakeables from Chase
for Business and Ruby Studio from iHeartMedia. We'll see you
back here soon.
Hosts And Creators
Ben Walter
Kathleen Griffith
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