Camillo Eriksson: Building the world’s biggest baby brand with Twistshake CEO

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Camillo Eriksson: Building the world’s biggest baby brand with Twistshake CEO – Youtube transcript

Today’s guest is Camillo Eriksson, the co-founder and CEO of twist Jake twist Jake is a Swedish brand that develops and sells a wide range of innovative baby products from baby bottles to strollers the company was founded in 2014 uh they grown rapidly and their products are now available in over 70 markets around the world welcome to the show thank you thank you yosua nice to be here so I’d be interested to learn just starting off with the the The baby bottle that started it all background how did this uh how did twist Shake come about what was the idea uh so where did did the idea for twitch came from uh it all started back in 2011 with my uh partner Viner he got the babysit for the first time and got to use a baby bottle and this was a very cumbersome task for him it was a lot of small parts there was lumps in the mixture and everything like ended up in the in in in the sink just he throw it away and said I’m never going to do this again uh he didn’t think much about it at that time he was working in real straight and construction but one day in the middle of the middle of the winter in 2014 he was at a construction site and saw a mother walking by with a stroller so it’s super cold in middle of winter snowy in Sweden um and the baby started crying in the stroller because it was hungry so the mother she reaches down to the pocket in the stroller to get the baby bottle the plastic bag with the formula powder and the insulator bottle and in her haste she drops everything on the ground and Wier sees all of this runs over there and helps her to get everything in order and when they stroll away he gets like this news flash or back Flash from when he was when he was babysitting and he said like he thought to himself is it still this cumbersome to just feed your baby and he’s a pretty impulsive guy so he decided right then and there you know I’m going to do something about this um and he likes when things goes quick so he thought about it the entire day and in the middle of the night he called me and said cam I have a great idea uh we’re going to make a baby bottle and I said sure why not you know let’s go um we had a lot of ideas and and let’s see what gets uh what’s get into reality um and I mean I don’t think you would see him and me as kind of founders of of a baby company and we didn’t have kids we knew nothing about sales and marketing we had no experience in product development and like this was just a uh like two two small happenings in in in random events so the first first kind of thing we had to to understand is that is there an actual need for like improving the way that you feed your baby with baby bottles so what we did is we we gathered a group of parents roughly 100 parents uh to get insights into the market started asking a simple CL questions what are the main problems with feeding your baby with a baby bottle and what we realized is that uh there were lumps in the lumps in the mixture uh a lot of small parts hard to clean there was no easy way to carry around like fruits biscuits form an up when you’re on the go and like we looked at it then and realized okay these are pretty like trivial issues to fix right it’s it’s it’s not something hard I think we we already had ideas on how to how to fix it and baby bottles has been around for 40 50 years and they always look the same uh they’ve been marketed with a like from a do ‘s office and we quickly realized you know these guys they’re not listening to the consumer they’re they’re not like they’re so far away from the market that they don’t uh take input so like what what we had managed to do in a month was to find actual problems of G Gap in the market a a product that we could or at least try to to to bring to reality um and and and that’s kind of how everything started we also looked at the at the baby bottles and saw like they haven’t changed much in 40 50 years um and they look very like sterile and boring and we wanted to make something that was more in line with like today’s F fashion expectations on on on on products and also something that you wanted to show something that you wanted to um kind of have as part of your life you know more more than just something that you need so I think that’s the that’s the summary and that’s how we started and from then we’ve been going full on uh every day putting our hearts and and and passion into this this project and it’s it’s turned out uh really really nice that’s pretty incredible you know you did not have the personal experience The early days of you know having babies but you took this very systematic empirical approach and found the the market Gap and and and how it wasn’t served by existing existing Solutions so how what were the first the early days like was this just an immediate success you brought the baby bottle to Market parents loved it or how what were the first year or so like I think the the the first at least three years we did nothing else but this uh like I think we we always put really like we try try to put ourselves in a corner where we don’t really have a choice that to just go ahead so I think I remember when we went to Far East to to do the first production wider you know he he ordered 100,000 baby bottons to begin with that was the first orderer so so we did we didn’t really have have an option um so when when we actually launched the brand uh you know as a new started company we didn’t have a lot of money but we had a lot of products uh so it was pretty evident what we were supposed to do but I think the first three years was um was just a lot lot on of focus on uh sales and marketing and well like like I said at the beginning we as we didn’t have kids we had just uh researched the baby bottle but when we first started approaching stores you know we we had a baby bottle our competitors they had full ranges of products like 40 30 to 40 products why would they take in a colorful baby bottle and like take a brand that they’ve been having for 40 50 years so we also realize you know in order to be competitive on the market but also uh like feel trustworthy to the consumer because like you’re you’re you’re starting a family this is a lot of responsibility you’re putting a lot of weight into the trust of the brand that you’re choosing for your baby and we we looked at it and said like we we look pretty weak uh just having a baby bottle so we put a lot of f Fus into product development as well um and and I’ve launched I think 5 to 15 original design products each year like what we’ve done in the baby industry is is has never ever happened on planet Earth like at this at this rate of development but yeah going back to the early days I think uh any any any new started business uh the thing you have is time and the more time you invest into your produ project hopefully the better it will be I think what what you see in a new starter company is that you have a lot of flexibility and that’s your advantage you can you can change quick you can redesign the company if you want to in a day maybe that’s not the best thing but in the beginning you really have to try and you have to try and try and try and find what works for you and what worked for us was really this was in the not in the most earli earli stages but it was in the earliest stage of influencer marketing where people had a lot of blogs so you didn’t call them influencers you call them bloggers and uh since we didn’t have any I mean our our idea was that we just put twii on the market and it’s going to sell by itself and and and and you know we don’t have to work anymore I don’t know but uh that wasn’t really the case so but we had a lot of products like we said we ordered 100,000 baby bottles so we started giving out baby bottles to Baby to to bloggers and asked them you know uh would you like to try our new product this these are the advantages or this is how it works please try it and give us like your honest review like just tell us what you think um we don’t want to prove anything we just want to know what you think and and that’s kind of how we started working a lot with influencer marketing so earlier days you days a week no stop that’s how it was I think for the first three years to be honest how did you you know not burn out from this just the amount of work that Meaning, hard work and avoiding burnout you had to do but also the massive risk taking like did that not feel scared to order 100,000 baby bottles not knowing who’s going to buy them like how did you how did you cope with this personally and mentally I think you know this is something that really pushes I’m speaking for myself now I can speak somewhat maybe for Wier but I think this is really what we have to put in a lot of like we we’re high stakes people you know if if if they’re not if it’s if the stakes are not high enough it’s not interesting enough so in order to to to get your full attention you kind of want to put all the other Temptations out the window and and one way you can do that is just to invest everything you have like I put everything I had into this sold everything I had moved into a small apartment and just yeah lived at the office basically and um I think I mean if looking at burning out and and stuff like that I mean of course there are tough times but at the end of the day like as long as you can you know feel like that that the amount of time you’re putting into it is is is giving you something back and and and you can live on that and you see what you’re doing today actually is something that you can feel build up on tomorrow which makes it a lot more meaningful and then you have to of course also see see to yourself if I’m putting putting on too much stress so that I would burn out I will you know what will happen to the company I have a responsibility I canot you know treat myself in whatever way I like even if I work a lot that doesn’t it doesn’t mean that you will burn out there’s not a one to one I think there’s a lot of other factors such as stress or like the way you feel about yourself that’s that’s kind of what we did we just put all everything out the window and just focused on one thing one thing only and um yeah I mean that worked out apparently you don’t know until DET try right so I think you made a really good point that it’s about understanding yourself like you said you’re a person yeah it has to be kind of extreme high stakes all in for it to be interesting that gets your attention and and so you kind of set you you painted yourself like you said a corner there was only one way out and that was through like just a massive amount of hard work and taking risk exactly and I I mean this is not this is before twick as well I I kind of realized about myself that uh like if when you go to school like you you every you have your teachers you have people that look out for you they want to follow up with you every six month or every year you have grades some will tell you you did a good job or you did something bad and then you know when you graduate or whatever you do you get out in life and everything is on you right so I I I kind of looked at those things and said okay if I if I commit to someone if I say you know I promise you I will do this then I will feel a sense of purpose even though whatever this thing might be it’s it’s it’s more meaningful than just saying oh I want to become the the greatest uh XY Z or I’m going to do this because you don’t have that kind of commitment you can you can make a commitment to yourself but I think at the end of the day um you have to find that motivation that drive that really makes you go up in the morning if it’s just for yourself you know I want I said to my wake up this morning I said like I’m going to clean today am I going to clean today probably not but if I promise my mother you know I’m going to clean today I’m probably going to do it you know so it’s it’s it’s those kind of easy you have to have like easy systems and processes for yourself in order to achieve what you want to achieve at the end of the day right absolutely I want to go back to something you mentioned in the early The process for consistently launching innovative new products days you were launching like a dozen product or so new products every year product launches that’s really difficult for a lot of companies there’s a lot of failures it takes a long time so can you talk about the process if you had a process for it you mentioned some how you approach it with the baby bottles but did you kind of formalize a a a process for product development or how did you think about it in the early days so I mean we we W A lot of people people in the beginning I mean we kind of at the end of three years I think we were 10 15 people at the company I mean I mean that worked with kind of the business I mean for for us we have always done everything ourselves uh that’s been kind of the the end goal and I think just for product development it’s it’s been me and wer has focused a lot on that uh trying to get like what we wanted to create is is is to bring in Innovation into each qual uh uh into each category that we went into so you know fortunately with babies like everybody is following kind of the same path you know you’re born and then you need help eating and then you going to cups you going to table work c three and stuff like that so it’s pretty much the same Journey for for every baby so it was very easy for us to understand what do we need to make like what kind of categories do we need to develop or or or to have products within to fit like the entire baby’s life and we focus from like0 to 4 years that’s been our our uh target audience so to speak it’s not an audience like it’s the parents but uh but probably for babies since Z to four years old and I think in the beginning was a lot about uh what what we actually made was like designing original designing our own products and I think at in the beginning of a company you don’t have a lot of money to to go and put against uh product development so we were fortunate I I mean I had some experience in in 3D carding and we took a lot of help from uh from our manufacturers and also worked a lot with a partner with st but at the end of the day it was a lot a lot about finding time um to to look at each category see okay how can we make this category stand out how can we add something into this category uh that creates a meaning that adds a value like real a real added value to the parents so it’s it’s always been about it’s always been about that so like the second product we launched was the was the C Cups where we have a mixer that acts as an instant fruit infuser so the whole idea about this is that you know of course you want to give water to your babies or or or toddlers but at the end of the day they going to they they want to have something tasty they want to have something different you don’t want to give these um uh juices with added sugars and stuff like that so we said okay can we make something different we looked at the the uh fruit infusers you could put put in your fridge but they were very slow you didn’t have a lot of fun with it so we developed and pattern that our own like mixing solution for it you just shake the bottle you have instant fruit and flavor fruit flavored water so it’s been a lot about that like trying to find the main issue main problem and and a solution for that within every product category and that’s why I think we’ve been so successful in in product development and this is stayed with the companies since since our first idea and did you like early on or still to this day try to quickly find a problem create a prototype get it out to like a test group of users or how do you make sure that that process is as quick as possible and that you don’t waste time on products that are not going to have that kind of broad appeal that you’re looking for I mean first of all we we look at I mean it’s this a it’s this a product that every baby would need or all parents would need we’re we’re not we’re I mean looking at babies it’s a niche category you know we’re trying to find parents with bab like pregnant mothers or parents with baby Ser for years old this is already like dividing a market or or fighting it’s a niche so trying to find niches within the niche uh that’s really not going to work out for us that’s something we realized early so number one we’re always looking for products that’s going to fit the entire uh target audience everybody needs it like we say it’s a must have it’s not a need to have it’s a must have um and after that I mean we’ve become better at this we now I think also we utiliz tools such as uh like looking into marketplaces looking at Google searches I think uh our latest product the bath stand is actually a result of us looking into search history and search um and it was actually our sem uh consultant that recommended us oh guys you know people are actually good Googling the twish bathtub the twish bathtub stand um there seems to be a gap in the mark and we said my God it’s so evident Let’s Do It um but after that like you said of course you know we after we’ve decided ourselves we really put our hearts into it and want to try and make something really quick and then it’s about getting it into a a a test group of parents uh having them try it out making adjustments and then getting it on Market as soon as possible that’s that’s really true right there’s so much data out there if you know how to access this access it access it and interpret it customers are essentially always telling us with their behavior search or or otherwise what they’re looking for so it’s not really you don’t really need to guess exactly and I think also that I mean we put I don’t know how many thousands of hour into into only baby so you become you know everything thing you know all the competitors you know all the products that that are out there uh you see and you follow Trends so you become you you need to become a nerd in what you’re doing and I mean I I don’t have kids today but I I I know everything that’s going to happen month by month you know so you really I think that’s also a big part in it you have to know your your vision what you’re trying to create for us it’s always been making life easier for parents and then knowing a lot about what you’re trying to do and trying to achieve so so the day if if when you have children you’ll be completely prepared because you’ll know everything about what they yeah I mean I know what’s going to happen I don’t know how how it is but like yeah now we have month three this is what’s supposed to happen let’s see whatever happens we see going back to what you mentioned with influencer marketing uh early How they succeeded with influencer marketing before Instagram kind of took off it was about the blogs and you you did that um you’ve also done influencer marketing at a huge scale when it comes to Instagram so I’d be curious to kind of if you could talk about the the process and some of the results and how you approach it because a lot of companies they do it maybe maybe they look at infl marketing as a branding as opposed to something that will cry actual sales and they just allocate a little bit but you have had a I think quite unique approach that I’d be curious to to learn about yeah I think you you speak to more more people than I do but I mean our approach has been like from from the beginning we we quickly realized like uh we sent out products we didn’t have a lot of data or insights or anything like that but we saw spides in traffic on our website so we saw that you know this is actually something that’s creating interest people are looking at the products reading about them visiting visiting our website and and I mean at the end of the day trying out our products um so you know I think we do we did as a lot of other company do you started in an Excel file and you start to try and and and and manage all of this but like I have I have a lot of respect for for for anybody doing influencer marketing and then succeeding with it it’s a lot to keep track on like you know you cannot just work with one influencer you have to work with I don’t know tens hundreds thousands of them and then control that so it’s it’s it’s really a lot about and and making sure that you contact them in the right way that you uh send them products that you follow up with them everything is scheduled and it’s it’s we saw it as a process I think in the beginning that’s one part of it of course it’s it’s it’s not everything but one part of it was the process and when we were when we were smaller or in the beginning we just have one person her name is elen she’s still with the company driving the entire sales team right now amazingly uh and like when when it was just her working with this it was easy but when we had two people trying to enter the same Excel file at the same time it became a problem so you had influencers that were contacted by the same people and it’s just like it didn’t really look good from from our standpoint so we decided then uh like how do we fix this and I I have some background in programming so I said I will build a system and everybody asked like okay how long time is this going to take I said it’s 4 days uh I actually I it took 30 days like 16 hours a day but so you you know you underestimate yourself overestimate yourself and at at the end of those 30 days we had like this system that we call twist net and it’s still something that we use for for influencer marketing today so it it it allows you to have better control um almost a real time followup on sales like are generated through the influencers that we work with and and it it gave us kind of a a a a process a method of working a way to measure ourselves a way a way to improve okay what’s working what’s not working and and and kind of a language like a a a language around it so you create a a a culture and and and a system and a process and as long as you really go for it I think you can you can do this with whatever you want so I think that’s one of our one of the corner blocks in into making influencer marketing successful and and I I think also in terms of building the team we’ we’ve always strived for people that are very result oriented uh so if you can follow over your sales every 5 minutes you see what works and what doesn’t work you get this kind of uh reward feeling okay I made something good here okay let’s do more of that or you know this didn’t really work out okay let’s try something different and then that’s that’s how we’ve we’ve developed it I think that’s really interesting um the fact that you didn’t kind of accept what they think most companies do is they accept that okay this is going to be hard to measure we’re just going to see it as investment in the brand you actually went about building a system that will give the feedback so you can make Improvement but also so you can make those huge Investments because I know you built a really big team and you’ve you’ve done this at a huge scale um and I I think I know it goes back to you’re a very analytical person and kind of also Extreme as we talked about in the beginning so if you if you see that something’s working you want to push that kind of take it to the extreme so I’d be interested to learn if you guys have done approach have had a similar approach in other areas like where it comes to retail when it comes to digital advertising are you kind of always looking to create a system where you get feedback and and so you always know what’s what’s kind of working like how do you have you taken a similar very systematic result oriented approach to all your marketing efforts I think what what we said in the beginning was that okay um let’s F let’s Twistshake’s 3 pillars for growth let’s find a few things that we’re really really good at or something that we want to become really really good at and and and and the three things that we aligned around was number one was developing developing good products and that’s something that we achieved number two was focus a lot on influencer marketing and then we also said like offline sales so those were the kind of the three pillars that we focused on and spent most of our time on I mean you you can do uh like you can Branch out and do millions of things in a company but we we said okay we’re not experts in in any of these areas I mean let’s focus on three things and become really really good at that and when we become bigger we can we can expand into different things but this is going to be the backbone of of twistshake so I think I mean of course you can apply it like measurements analytics and so on uh but to the extent that we’ve done with influencer marketing and stuff I I mean this you have now eight hours a day five five 5 days a week right so even if you add on a lot of people you still have to it takes a lot of time to build that culture around how you look at things and how you evaluate and how you how you it’s one one one thing to build a system I think a lot of people could do that but how do you make that into a a way of working how do you make that into celebrations how do you build a team around it and that takes time so but yeah I mean of course we we have a lot of numbers I I mean sometimes we have a lot I think a beit too many numbers but I I think all a lot of them make sense and and it is about I mean trying to give a good overview on on what to do next I think that’s that’s that’s the ambition and allowing people on on speaking the same language and having kind of a a consensus into what what are you doing what are you measuring I think it’s really no it makes a lot of sense I think it’s really interesting that you quite early on it sounds like you were able to identify like these are the three things we’re going to focus on we’re going to do it over over and over again and get better and better at it and we add a couple of other things as well but this is the this is kind of the Playbook that we’re going to run I feel like that’s that’s a huge competitive Advantage because a lot of companies are stabling and you know maybe there’s a new CMO or CEO who wants to do his or her own thing so very few companies I feel have that continuity uh that you’ve been doing like you’ve been doing influencer marketing for years and years and years you develop this sophisticated process that I think it would be almost impossible at this point for your competitors to copy um so it feels like it’s a huge competitive advantage to have that kind of focus and uh Contin yeah it’s that’s that’s I think that’s pretty much it and of course you know as we become a bigger bigger company you have to do uh more things and and expand upon that but you have to really understand what’s your bread in water what’s like the the own the three things or four things or whatever whatever it is that you decide upon that always have to work uh because that’s the foundation of the business something that you’ve been very The uncomplicated way to expand internationally successful at is expansion International expansion and that’s something that a lot of companies struggle with for you know it’s it’s very difficult for a lot of reasons so uh what do you think what do you kind of prescribe that describe that uh success to like what has allowed you to succeed successfully go to New Market after New Market I think um this is we we in the beginning we looked at it as as sales so imagine um trying to sell in selling baby products in Sweden right you have 200 baby stores that’s it uh so we we called through them in two months I think and after that you have EA you have the big supermarkets and the pharmacies and they don’t want to talk to you unless you have two years in the market whatever so I mean after two months H nobody in the baby industry wanted to talk to me anymore because they were they don’t I mean they’re not going to say yes even if I call tomorrow but uh so then we set sales on you know babies are the same in any market right so there’s there’s no real big difference I think we when we actually launched the product we started calling like just cold calling on on markets in Europe and trying to see like is there anyone uh that wants to bring on the brand everything from retailers to uh Distributors and and and everything like that and that’s kind of of how we’ve done our International expansion from from kind of a business to business standpoint and I think like we’ve also talk to a lot of like this is Sweden or alme or you know everybody’s trying to make it complicated I think it’s about understanding the risk like what risk are you willing to take to do International expansion um of course there are culture differences but I mean at the end of the day you’re going to sell a brand you’re going to sell products that’s the same everywhere goal so I I think what made us succeed I think by the end of the first year we were in 14 countries end of year two we were in 45 countries it’s like don’t make it too hard like it’s it’s about putting their hours into it and if if you’re if you’re trying to over complicate things um you’re not really going to have time to spend on what you really need to spend time on and then if you talk about sales is is Outreach like how do you reach enough people how do you find them how do you convert them how do you make them interested in the brand and that’s what you need to focus on and then you can decide how much risk do you want to take do you want to sell on with payment terms or what what do you want to do like that’s that’s that’s up to you but if this is the right way or the wrong way I don’t know uh you can do it in in different ways what we did is that we said okay let’s let’s let’s go wide in terms of expansion in the beginning uh that’s made us very successful in the a lot of countries uh where we haven’t actually had to take a lot of risk we built with Partnerships and with distributors in South America in in GCC in Southeast Asia and so on and then in in Europe we focused a lot on our our own activities such as like marketing with the the influencers and so on with our own uh PTC I don’t know if that’s an answer but I think in terms of international expansion you can do it in a different uh uh bu of different ways what we’ve done is we’ve gone in traditionally with with our offline business first if it had if it didn’t didn’t work uh we also expanded with online but the online is limited by the logistics for us I mean if we cannot if we we cannot ship to the US from Sweden that’s going to ruin the the p&l completely so it’s it’s not really an option if we want to go there you know then we have to do a lot of Investments and then it’s about risk taking again I think it’s really refreshing to hear someone say that it doesn’t have to be that complicated and you can actually just look at it quite simply take a small uh figure out kind of how much we’re risk you’re willing to take and then just go for it yeah and I think I mean we’ve I think there are like different things for for everything I mean if if you’re a smaller company as well you don’t have that maybe those muscles that you need to go in hard like you do a Red Bull in in in Sweden you know that’s out of the question so you have to work with what you have and we’re a self-funded company like or we’ not entirely I mean we have we we took in an investor in 2018 but I mean that was not for the for the cashing it was more about finding structure and finding like that uh teacher I was talking to about in the beginning someone who can push and and poke at you uh but you have to work with the means that you have I that’s that’s from our point of view and if if you don’t want to do that then you know you need to raise capital and and and do it in a different way so I I think it’s it’s all about that kind of risk taking and if you don’t know how much risk you want to take you should start there and see what does it mean I want to become number one brand in in every country in the world yeah okay let’s break it down exactly I think the twist Jak story is a great story of like great example of how constraints create creativity uh we you don’t have a lot of money you need to be creative um I’d be curious to to to kind of um talk about the the Focusing on profitability and doubling AOV current environment has been really difficult for a lot of e-commerce directed consumer Brands um demand is kind of going down across a lot of sectors or a lot of segments and customer acquisition costs have been been kind of going up and so getting getting the unit economics to work has been a struggle for a lot of lot of companies how have you been thinking about improving profitability and what are some of the concrete ways that you’ve gone about it you mentioned um off off air that you focus a lot on on raising average order value that’s been successful and kind of the key yeah I I think also for us um like imag it’s it’s been crazy years like with our our business BL was like 50/50 are on Ecom uh and and offline online offline if that’s how we put it and before uh preco and then Co hit so 50% of our business is got to go away or you know we have to treat pretty differently and then after that we had uh the container price issues where containers went from like $2,000 to $15 to $118,000 and we have pretty bulky Goods so I mean this this situation right now that we’re in I it’s it’s never been as good as it is now like in the last four years uh from from from that point of view where you have to be creative or where you have to be more profitable I mean we’ve taken huge hits from um macro Trends and like pandemics and then infl like inflation is like the what I’m trying to say is like the inflation thing is from my perspective like it’s the least complicated thing that’s happened over the last few years uh but of course it’s still it’s still it still still affects us um but yeah I mean trying to find profitability I I think what we really realized at the end of um we we work a lot with margins we looked at cost of sale gross margin one gross margin 2 gross margin 3 and so on uh one exercise that we we definitely forgot about is to look at the actual like like the hard figure like because you can we had an amazing cost of sale like what we thought on on getting in new customers but at the end of the day we didn’t find profitability in the online Channel and what it really like what it really was about is that we had a very low average of the value so we sell a baby bottle pacifiers like cups and stuff like that everything is uh below € and if you weigh in shipping that’s around you know 5 to8 if someone orders a baby ball from you uh you’re going to be like going back in time that’s kind of like how we thought about it like okay this order makes us go back in time if the customer doesn’t come back so we said okay let’s try try and make everything profitable let’s try and make every order profitable and find strategies to uh to see to that we can still have all customers hacky so we went from I think an average order value we doubled average order value in in less than four months and we actually lost like 40% of on orders but we increased the revenue by by 10% so and and we also saw um since we we reduced the number of orders on on our own online we saw the the stores and and our partners growing quicker so we were pretty much saying no to certain customers because and and then they found the products in in other avenues such as going to the stores and where where there is no shipping cost so to so to be and and that’s also like looking back at it it was a pretty like big decision to take but sometimes we we didn’t really test it we didn’t really do anything we just said okay it’s the hard stop now we’re going to change from one direction to the other but it was it’s also about like the risk taking again like we were willing to take the risk we were willing to say okay let’s go for this uh we’re not going to look back we’re not going to change this is the new reality and if you look at it that way instead of like oh let’s try it a bit let’s go back let’s you know not everyone is behind it you’re you’re not going to go anywhere no that’s interesting do you think Company culture and focusing on what matters that you know certainly this going back to what you said uh in the beginning of the podcast is when you’re a young company you can change direction overnight has that gone harder now that you’re a much much bigger organization and how have you kind of tried to create a culture of people who are have that kind of risk appetite that you know you you have personally how are you gone about creating that culture yeah I don’t necessarily think that it’s a good idea to have uh more people with that kind of risk appetite I think you’d like that if you have a bow that that bow feels pretty quickly uh because it’s easy to come up with ideas and take risks that it’s not a hard thing it’s like making sure you follow through and and actually apply them uh but I mean of course like I said we focused on the three things uh organization was not one of them in the beginning and I think uh looking back at it um like in the beginning you really need to put a lot of man like hours into it to make a difference but then it comes kind of a tilting point where your hours doesn’t really matter as much as they did before and then you have to realize like it’s it’s not it’s it’s it’s becoming something bigger it’s becoming like you said a culture organization that needs to work and then needs to flourish and I mean I think I’ve done hopefully the majority of the mistakes that you can do in the book uh but we will see the future is to tell and um I mean it’s it’s a I think it’s a different uh it’s a different way working with people than working with like strategies like there’s there’s one way I mean I’m very good with numbers very analytical and they don’t have emotions right they don’t have they don’t have anything to say to you or like working with a computer it’s it’s going to be what it is but when you start working with people you have to put it up in in different ways and we’ve actually like now I think we’ve managed really good I mean to have a strong management team that have a really like strong passion for management and leading people and and and then you have to listen to that and understand what steps needs to be taken in what order maybe you cannot change things overnight but if you can be satisfied with changing things over like a a a a a time period Then I mean everybody gets what they want right so I think that’s what we I I mean from my side as definitely have grown and and and understood that um and you also have to reflect about that there’s not you’re not going to make a switch in a in a bigger company that’s going to change like the business like there’s there’s very few things that you can do um that’s not going to have like a really really big impact on the business so I think in the beginning also like you you don’t really have those income streams you don’t know how how the business is doing so it becomes easy for you to switch like there’s no risk in it but looking at it right now if I were to make something up tonight when I dream on something and and go to the and tomorrow let’s say let’s switch Direction completely you know it’s it’s not going to work and that’s not necessarily something you want to do so now you have to work it through you have to but I think that’s good really good yeah it really speaks to kind of also your role as CEO that you need to you have your personality and your personal strengths but you have to involved with the organization and you have to just constantly learn and and reevaluate absolutely and and and also taking people that you like that that necessarily doesn’t work like you or have the same ideas or uh you have to you have to find different people and the combination of all of that that’s what’s going to make make the success going stronger and that’s I think also what makes it a lot more fun um so not a lot of fun to succeed alone it’s one other people with you and you can do it together absolutely camil it’s been a it’s been a a lot of fun learning about learning about twist Shen and and the origins and the story um for people who want to follow of course you can go to twist Shen and get all the baby baby products if you have a child between the ages of zero to four absolutely follow us on Instagram we’re the biggest baby brand in the world so become one of our followers you have to follow that journey and for people who want to follow follow you specifically is that LinkedIn are you active on any any other Java baby blog people can follow is it LinkedIn oh no I I don’t so it’s LinkedIn I’m not a frequent poster so like to work in the dark you know okay so well you know maybe people are proding you and and to get you to start sharing more more frequently because I think that would be really beneficial absolutely thanks a lot Camila have a great uh great rest of the day and thank you so much for thank you to your thank you thank you very much for having me thank you for listening you can find all episodes of the growth pod on Spotify YouTube and apple [Music] podcasts