What began as a suburban couple’s search for new sheets ended with the founding of a direct-to-consumer luxury bedding business. On this week’s episode, Scott and Missy Tannen, the married co-founders of luxury bedding company Boll and Branch, share how their relentless curiosity led them to become a viral-marketing success and the biggest consumer of Fair Trade Certified organic cotton in the world.
What began as a suburban couple’s search for new sheets ended with the founding of a direct-to-consumer luxury bedding business. This week on the first shoppable podcast, Scott and Missy Tannen, the married co-founders of luxury bedding company Boll and Branch, share how their relentless curiosity led them to become a viral-marketing success.
Just over five years in, Boll & Branch is already the biggest consumer of Fair Trade Certified organic cotton in the world -- but customers don't always care. Scott and Missy talk the realities of building an environmentally conscious business, how they created a unique brand in today's crowded consumer product landscape and the personal risks they took to accomplish it all (think five mortgages).
Every episode of "Finding Inspo with Alex Barinka" is shoppable through e-commerce company Verishop to help you discover new brands through their unique stories. Scott, Missy and host Alex Barinka have curated their favorite products in the Finding Inspo store at verishop.com/inspo.
New Verishop customers can take 20% off their first purchase with the code INSPOBB (exclusions may apply; code expires 30 days after episode publication and cannot be combined with other promotions).
Follow the podcast on Instagram at @inspopodcast and Alex Barinka on Twitter and Instagram at @alexbarinka. Tweet or comment to Alex on social media, or write a podcast review, about where you are finding inspo from this conversation, and she may read your takeaways on the next episode.
This podcast is executive produced by Alex Barinka, who also serves as head of external affairs at Verishop. Special thanks to Wonder Media Network for editing and production support. See you soon!
Alex Barinka: Hey y'all. Alex Barinka here out of external affairs at Verishop and host of Finding Inspo, the very first shoppable podcast where we'll bring you the stories of some of the biggest names and style and design, digging deep into how they turned inspiration into successful businesses. And each week my guests and I carried the Finding Inspo shop at verishop.com/inspo with the products that emerge from their personal stories. I have two very special guests this week, Scott and Missy Tannen, the husband and wife team that founded direct to consumer luxury bedding brand Boll and Branch, Just five years old, the Tannen's company has been dubbed a viral marketing success with happy customers, including three U.S. presidents Boll and Branch is already the biggest purchaser of organic fair trade certified cotton. And their sheets only cost the equivalent of a dollar a night for less than the first year. But Scott and Missy didn't start as textile aficionados -- far from it.
Alex Barinka: When you think about kind of the, the early formative days of each of your careers, where were you when you started?
Scott Tannen: Well, my first job, um, was that I would open the mail that came to Nabisco with people's resumes in the envelopes. And, um, I had to take the resumes out of the envelopes and scan them. I hated that. Uh, and I hated it. By about the second day I worked there. Um, I came home with paper cuts and all kinds of things like that and said this, there has to be a better way. And I remembered that thing called the Internet, which, you know, this is 1999. And what the Internet had basically enabled me to do was never go to the library and still get all my research papers done. And so I, I on my own time, came up with a way where people could submit their resumes electronically instead of me having to get paper cuts and scan them. Um, and so over the process of about six months, I, I learned how to make a website, how to build an upload function, how to build a database and all of those sorts of things and rolled out Nabisco's first career website, which was awesome. Um, except for the fact that I didn't have a job anymore afterwards because I wasn't needed. Um, so that at that point I, I remember vividly someone saying, we've got to figure out how to get you to sell cookies and crackers for us. Um, and that's how I sort of became, you know, Nabisco is really first ever digital or Internet marketing department. I was, you know, a 22 year old kid with, with not much experience but, um, maybe a little more tech savvy and, and traditional organization. And away I went.
Alex Barinka: So missy take us to 1999. Where were you then? What were you working on
Missy Tannen: back in 1999 actually, both Scott and I graduated that same year from Vanderbilt University and I had studied to be a teacher after graduation. I moved up to New Jersey and applied for any teaching job, you know, from, I was certified from k through eighth grade and wound up, um, getting a job in third grade. So I loved being a teacher. I was a third grade teacher in Bridgewater, New Jersey. Um, and what I really loved about it was working with the children, working with their parents, um, and really getting in there and figuring out how each child learns best and how to take the material that, that I was teaching and adapt it for each child. So I was the teacher who always loved having a hands on project that we would do, whether it was math or science or anything in between. There would always be some component of something we were making or doing like a physical representation of, of the topic. Um, so for me, I've always been a maker. I've always loved whether it was quilting or painting or learning how to play the guitar or any number of unfinished arts and craft projects. I really loved making things from the very beginning
Alex Barinka: and definitely not a typical desk job kind of gal.
Missy Tannen: No, definitely not. I love that I was in control of my third grade universe and we had the special little bubble of our classroom where everyone, it was ideal. Like, you know, everyone was respectful of one another and when she doesn't use her desk,
Scott Tannen: a really nice chair. And it's the least used chair in the end.
Missy Tannen: Yeah, that's probably true.
Alex Barinka: And, and we have to get a little personal cause not only are you partners in business but you're partners in life as well. At what point were you in your relationship as at this time you're just out of college. Can you just kind of talk me through, so we have a sense,
Scott Tannen: we met in the fall of our junior year at Vanderbilt. If you don't know much about Vanderbilt and southern schools, um, football games are not just, you know, show up in shorts and a tee shirt. Um, their, their affairs that you in many cases you wear like a tie and a jacket and the girls wear cocktail dresses and you'd go with dates. Um, and two of our best friends sort of at the very last minute mortared more or less forced us to go on a blind date with each other. We didn't know each other. And so that was the beginning of our junior year. And to be honest, we haven't been a part since.
Alex Barinka: Look, I am a Texas born Texas raised North Carolina Grad. So I recognize the magic of the football game. Um, that makes me really happy to hear. So. So you all met, um, you loved the football culture, a, you've moved out to jersey, um, you were working at Nabisco finally. Now this job is kind of the, the spearhead of Nabisco's digital marketing department. What happened next in the course of your lives?
Scott Tannen: I guess I realized I was suddenly like in the corporate machine a little bit, but, but because I was, I was sort of, you know, I spent most of my time in the first few years of my business convincing people that the Internet wasn't a passing fad and that we needed to use it to advertise. And, and literally I became kind of somewhat of an internal salesperson, but really like an entrepreneur within a large company. Um, so, you know, my dad was more of a traditional marketing person. I always kind of thought I was going to be a brand manager and one day go get my MBA and then, and then work on big brands for my whole career. And I love working on big consumer brands, but, but I really started to find my way in terms of creating new and different ways to engage customers.
Scott Tannen: And so from a professional standpoint, you know, I was beginning to move from being a kid that was just sort of like figuring out marketing and maybe not understanding what rules I'm supposed to follow in a big company where it's like you're not supposed to think of new things. You're just supposed to do what everybody did before you, um, you know, and, and, and then moving it up and not mess it up. I mean, if you think about it, like I worked on a brand like Oreo, Oreo has been around for a hundred years and big companies like Nabisco or craft as we became, they are completely set up so that idiots like me cannot break Oreo, right? Like there is an entire system of executives and layers and red tape and it is both incredibly frustrating to work in that environment. But you also understand like I didn't break Oreo. Um, and that's probably a good thing for America.
Alex Barinka: I know a lot of kids that would not be happy yet. Had you done that? So, you know, it seems like a you and big corporate culture did clash a little bit. You seem like an optimist, right? You wanted to change things to jump on new things, to do things in a different way. But as you said, that's not really the internal temperament of a big corporation. Did you have an idea of how long he would be able to kind of emotionally almost make it work at that environment? Was there a kind of a clock put on your time there just because of some of the friction that you were running into?
Scott Tannen: No, and in fact, the further I've gotten from it, the more I look back and realize just how incredibly lucky I was to grow up in, in sort of, you know, big corporate or big brand marketing. Um, and especially as I think about and look at a lot of other startups and a lot of young companies, the idea of building brand, which, which at its core becomes this, this connection. I mean, you mentioned a lot of kids would be really upset if I did something to screw up Oreo. That's a brand, right? That's, that's the power of how emotional the relationship that somebody has with two chocolate wafer cookies and cream in the middle. Right? It's the fact that their parents had it to them and introduced it to them over a glass of milk and their parents were introduced to it by their grandparents and so on and so forth.
Scott Tannen: And, and I think that, that I look at it, I have the opportunity to work for some incredibly brilliant people that are, that have also done amazing things, whether it's in big companies or, or smaller businesses. Um, but, uh, you know, and I've been able to witness firsthand both the, the bureaucracy and the slow pace that a big company can move and understand ways to, well, I would do it differently this way and this way, but not, not so much where I would, I would do everything differently. And I think at Boll and branch, the reason our brand has resonated with so many people is a direct credit to so many people that I've learned from in terms of you know, how they've been able to find that true human connection between a company and a producer, a product and the person at the very end who's a using and enjoying it.
Alex Barinka: I think a lot of folks are in jobs or positions where they know it's not the end all be all for them, but they want to soak up as much as they can, but sometimes it's really hard to kind of operate with your eyes and ears open. What kind of advice would you give to people to make sure they're catching that inspiration when it comes and they're kind of filing it away in their personal filing cabinet to be sure that they can tap into it in the end?
Scott Tannen: I didn't start at Nabisco with the idea that this was a stepping stone to, you know, going and founding a company or doing those sorts of things. Like I was really happy to have a job. I was really excited by the work I was doing and getting to work on the brands that I loved. And I would say that, you know, there's, there's an old quote that someone says where people don't leave companies, they leave, they leave people, right? They leave their boss. And to me like the, the greatest piece of advice I could give for anybody is to don't try to think six steps ahead, appreciate where you are. And more importantly, if you can attach yourselves to leaders and mentors that you walk in without your ego in hand. And you know, you don't say, Hey, I went to Wharton, that means I get to start a company and I am, you know, sort of like, like entitled to this role as founder or whatever that, that you expect to be.
Scott Tannen: If you can in the moment appreciate and enjoy the people from whom you get to learn and observe the decisions they make good and bad, um, and take away from it the full experience. Give yourself the time to think, well, I might've done it differently this way, or wow, that was really smart. I didn't think about that over time you're going to build your own playbook. But too often I, I, I, I do find that there are young people that kind of walk around with a chip on their shoulder that they believe they know more than everyone. And the only thing holding them back is their years of service. And, and in some cases that's certainly true, but in other cases, if you, again, you try to look at it from an optimistic, positive perspective, we're all better from by the people who teach us and then we get to learn from it.
Scott Tannen: And that's why I always say to people when they come to work here, like, look, my job is to get you to where you want to go in your career, which means I need to expose you to different things like you, you know, you might be a marketing person, but if you really want to get to the point where you can start your own business someday, but I need to expose you to what fundraising looks like. I need you to expose you to things like what it's like to work with an investor and for other people that don't have that interest, then you know, also realizing not to bog them down. The piece of advice I always give is just keep your eyes and ears open and appreciate that you don't know everything and the learning you can have firsthand from very smart people can't be replaced.
Alex Barinka: I know as I've gotten older, I am, I'm a lovely millennial. Um, I know a lot of folks like to peg us a certain way and I've definitely taken my salts and, and learned to know what I don't know. But on the flip side, I'll also say patience is really hard. Being kind of settling into something and doing that hard work is some, it's, it takes an emotional toll, especially if you're somebody like me, probably like you all who care very passionately about what you do. Missy, I'm sure you've learned a level of patience and emotional from
Missy Tannen: your past as a teacher. What have you kind of brought to the table in your new life at Bullen branch around operating in that space? You know, things that you learned that you bring to a job or to anything in life don't have to come from a physical four walled office. So I feel like there've been so many life experiences that both of us and our whole team bring to the table that are just as important as business decisions that they had witnessed or been part of. So for me, I never dreamed in my wildest dreams that I would be heading up all of our products at Boll and branch. So from day one my involvement has been, you know, we, we both together had this idea after I was shopping for sheets for our new bedroom of like, gosh, it's so confusing out there.
Missy Tannen: What is thread count mean? What is Egyptian cotton mean? What is all this like traditional marketing buzz out there? I just really want some soft sheets. And so once we had that idea, Scott could certainly size and see the business opportunity. But I was able to come from it of, okay, well what would it mean to make that? And that's not something I learned at school or I learned from being a teacher. It's just from being inquisitive and curious and kind of part of a hobby that I've always had of just tinkering with anything, whether it's you know, light switches or paint, you know, it's just, I love being busy and using my hands. So my job since day one has been to make up the boll and branch products, not only from how they look and all of the details that go into crafting our sizes that are so thought out in our stitching details.
Missy Tannen: But what does it mean to actually make our fabric and what is the cotton, you know, almost like a science project. Like we've, I fully looked at this like a research project. Like I need to learn everything I can about cotton and organic cotton and other materials and fibers that I could have used. And what makes that best end result? Like, what does that cotton do? What does the weave do? What is the yard size do? For me? It's been a combination of so many things in my life from what I've learned from my parents to being a teacher, to being a mom now, and just really our core values I think that we have as people and that the team here at Boll and branch our entire office. Everyone's very ambitious and driven, but also really kind. You know, we've really kind souls here I would say, and people who look out for one another and care for one another and care for our partners and it's something that's part of who Scott and I both are as people, but also the whole boll and branch ethos. Now
Alex Barinka: Let's take a quick break from my chat with Boll and Branch, cofounders, Scott and Missy Tannen. I wanted to remind you that like every Finding Inspo episode, this one is also shoppable. Scott, Missy and I have curated items from our conversation, and a few others that are inspiring us lately, for the special Finding Inspo store on Verishop. Next to each product, we'll also tell you why we're loving them. Find the store at verishop.com/inspo. And just for finding and spell listeners, new Verishop customers can take 20% off their first purchase with the code INSPOBB. I've gotten my hands on Boll and Branch sheets and let me tell y'all, they are luxe. And for me they've gotten even softer the more I've washed them. Coming up, we'll talk about how Scott and Missy landed on those materials that they are still using, the importance of brand building and the personal risks they took to get to where the company is now.
Alex Barinka: So let's do go back to even pre-day one when you were out there, you were looking for sheets, you were not seeing what you wanted to see. How did that conversation go? Did you all sit down? What did that conversation look like? When did you realize that this, this was something that you wanted to at least try or dig into?
Scott Tannen: So at the time I just sold my last company and I was doing some consulting and things like that. I knew I wanted to start something on my own. And, uh, Mrs entire goal in life at that point was to prevent me from playing video games all day while the kids were at school, um, on the couch because that's my natural habitat. That's what I would do. Um, and uh, and, and so she came home from the store and she's like, Gosh, you know, buying sheets is so difficult. And I thought I was like, oh my goodness, she is, she has all, she has to like, this is really what you're worrying about during the day. And I'm like, let me, alright, I will buy it. And so like, I literally jumped on Google, it was like nine o'clock at night and she went up to bed with the kids and I got I, the next morning I was like, honey, do you know, thread count doesn't matter.
Scott Tannen: And she's like, why? What are you talking about? And you know, to make a long story, very long story short, I spent most of the night literally uncovering a whole lot of things in bedding that like the little bit I knew was thread count or Egyptian cotton and like found out it was all like marketing bunk. And I'm like, literally everybody sleeps on this stuff and nobody knows anything about it. And that was the, that was sort of the launching off point where misses like, yeah, yeah. Okay, great. Did you buy anything? Like we need sheets, we have a king bed now. And, and, and so I started falling into the rabbit hole myself in terms of just, there's gotta be a better way. And at some point when it came down to, I was starting to meet with folks and this is like, oh my gosh, this guy who I would never dare let pick out. Betting for us actually is about to like take our life savings.
Alex Barinka: You're welcome America. Yeah. I jumped in and Scott did not design all of our products. Yeah. And it wasn't that simple, right? Like at first we thought like it could be that simple. You can. Luckily, you know, living in New Jersey we had access to a lot of importers in middleman who were in New Jersey or the city I, you know, that we just pop in and
Missy Tannen: meet with everyone. We could talk with anyone and it could be as simple as, you know, just take some base cloth that's, you know, sold in the market and you know, 90% of the sheets brands that are out there, they're all just private labeling.
Missy Tannen: Yeah, you put a put a, well I wouldn't it then it's like, do you even call them a brand? You just put a name on it and then it's like brand in a box and here's our website and you know, catchy phrase. But that's when it just didn't feel right to us. I, it was just in conversations with some of these people who I was like, oh my gosh, I'm so excited. The teacher in me, I want to see the factory where this is being made and I want to know like, where are the farms? I want to go to these places. Like, I just wanted to know who was behind the products. It was really shocking when people wouldn't let us know or they just didn't know. So
Scott Tannen: or more like go over to the wall and pick the option and please like don't bother me with these, with these what they thought were like silly questions. And the more, the more like walls we ran into around information, the more I started, at least in my mind. And I know missy as well, like we're like, wait there, there's something here. Why, why didn't none of us actually care about our sheets? Like, think of a product you use more often than your bedsheets. Like it's very, very difficult to think of a single product. And, and so every place that we went and they're like, well, you know, our sheets are made in Italy. And then like I would go in and reverse engineer their supply chain myself. This is, this is about a year and a half of our, our lives. And you can imagine, you know, we're, we're a real fun couple.
Scott Tannen: Um, let, let me just say we've got it like a dining room table of like 800 samples of fabric from all over the place and our friends like come over and they're like, yeah, great guys, this looks awesome. But we became really passionate because we felt that there was like, this was like a bit of a mystery. It was a bit of a puzzle of like, okay, if you were to start over, if you were to start the textile business over from scratch, what would we end up producing? There was a lot of social injustice as we all know, involved in the textile industry. There's a lot of environmental injustice there. There's a lot of like just consumers don't really trust textile companies and as we found probably for pretty good reason. So it became like, like this project, like what if we started it from scratch and we made every single right decision.
Scott Tannen: Do we even have a viable business or is this just a book about like why the world sucks? Why did you think people would care? I cared. When we think about what the most important ingredient to a successful new businesses is. Genuine passion and interest and like to, to really simply answer your question, I cared. I suddenly found myself deeply and sincerely caring about the product I would use and then, and by the same time being more or less disgusted with the way the industry worked, we really felt like we, we can make a change to an industry and a, we can do this. If we can actually prove out this concept that you can make a better product, more affordable and do everything the right way at the same time, just by like being a little bit less bloated of a company, then we could actually make a profound impact.
Scott Tannen: Everybody from the customer who doesn't care about all that, they're still sleeping on a better product to the people that are growing cotton that are going to finally live above the poverty line for the first time in their lives. Because we're fair trade certifying the cotton, like there's all this meaning and we found ourselves incredibly passionate about it. To the point that we said, what if we could tell the story? What if, what if a customer, what if the public had access to all the information? What if they actually could make an honest choice? Are they going to say, you know what, I'd rather buy the overprice low quality, high markup licensed sheets that are made from toxic cotton by men and women who are paid at a third of the living wage. Like is that the choice the public's gonna make? And so, so by the time we launched, we genuinely felt so incredibly passionate. We'd been to India, we met with so many people and, and we were maybe a bit blind in our optimism, but, but I think we're pretty optimistic people. We like to see the best in things. And I just remember, I just believed like we can't be the only ones that would when faced with this information that are gonna change our behavior.
Alex Barinka: And, and it is, it is such an admirable goal but it's also a really hard one. You're talking through here, breaking apart the supply chain of the existing producers and restarting it from the ground up without actually being able to turn that optimism into a product. You are still just left with a book. Can you kind of take me back and, and talk me through how you actually got to that first set of, of uh, that first sample, that first set of sheets, those first, uh, rolls of fabric that you are evaluating
Scott Tannen: the first step, once I, once I started to understand cotton growing and, and which is an agricultural product and, and I started to understand where it came from, not in terms of the region, but in terms of, of thinking about the process and the people you very quickly understand the importance of organic cotton. There's not this enormous demand among consumers for organic cotton. Like there is organic food, right? You don't eat it, it's a little bit more abstract to understand. But the environmental impacts quite simply is it's a fraction of of conventional cotton that uses a tons of pesticides and chemicals. And then when you think about the fact that you're, you're talking about rural villages, that their water and the things that they drink are coming right out of the ground. They don't have fancy filtration and things like that. So suddenly these chemicals and pesticides are finding their way into their water supply.
Scott Tannen: And, and you, Sarah, if I'm starting from zero, I cannot use anything but organic cotton. Otherwise I'm perpetuating something really, really bad for us. I, I it, it was, it was good old fashioned Google and hard and, and a lot of research for overseas publications and things like that. And I discovered a cotton cooperative called Chetna, whom we still were, now they're their largest purchaser of organic cotton. It was a cooperative, um, that was started, that was, was helping folks that lived in part of India where genetically modified seeds are not legal, so you can't farm them. So in their case they were going in and helping to teach these farmers how to farm organically so that they could have access to a cash crop and ultimately money and support their families and schools and and things like that. And I just became so impressed with the vision behind the NGO that that helped them get started.
Scott Tannen: And from there, you know, it was about finding a worst, where's the right factories, where, where the right cut and sows and dye mills and things like that. So while we're at the same time parallel pathing with all the conventional players and getting all their samples, we, we were building our are this supply chain to this, this idea of a supply chain. And as those samples came in and we realized when you have to design everything from scratch, you can make such a better product. And so those samples came in, we love them. And then we started blind testing them with our friends.
Missy Tannen: I had two pillow cases of each. I had an unwashed one and then one that I would wash around 10 times. I believe that I should be able to pick out the best fabric blindly. So how does it feel before it's washed? How does it feel after it's washed 10 times and that's what we had on our dining room table for so long and did pull in any friends, any family members, anyone who would want it to just see what was going on in our lives, what we're drawn into this blind test, I believe the most important thing was that we had a soft sheet that we had our whites being bright white. It wasn't like a traditional organic product where you might think of it being more natural in color and not as current in styling. So I wanted what we were making to be right on point with anything else in the market, in the luxury market.
Missy Tannen: I didn't want people to feel like they had to sacrifice style or colors or anything like that or softness for a better product. Luckily and digging and going along and even with the organic cotton that we found, not all organic cotton is created equally and not all. You can take any cotton and it's also then about how you spend the yard size, how you weave it, how you dye it, which is really important both for how it feels and for the environment. Then you get to that last cut and sew factory where those beautiful little stitching details come to be so important, but there's so much along the way that we were considering and so the combination of it was, I don't know, would you say March of 2013 right before we placed our first Po, we had all those samples out on the table, all the pricing because I also want to make sure that that the customer is getting what they're paying for.
Missy Tannen: I didn't feel like you should have to spend more money to get a product that you'd only see a little bit of a difference. I always wanted to make sure it was worth it. So there was that moment of truth in March and April where we had to pick something to move forward with or just like let all this year long research go. And at that time side-by-side Rana Plaza was the deadliest factory collapsed in history that happened in Bangladesh killing thousands of workers from an unsafe factory. So we're hearing that just as consumers, you know, watching the news. And then here I have all these fabrics out there and I'm like, Gosh, I'm going to do this blindly. I want that fair trade, organic cotton to win, but I'm not going to cheat the customer. I still want it to be soft and beautiful and thank goodness for everything we believe in and for our customers.
Missy Tannen: And for now the life of Boll and branch, those sheets that were the fair trade organic one, hands down on their own to create the best product we could make. So from that point forward we placed our first po and then we launched January of 2014 and I think that that is an important distinction in terms of the, the quality of the fabric and the price point in all of these things. I do think if you want to sell to a mass audience, you have to care more about just it being organic and fair trade. And that's a bit of a shame. But customers are fickle. They want what they want, they want to see what they want and they want quality. How did you kind of think about balancing those two things? Because to your point, it's not the easy route to make something that is both eco and not, uh, perhaps granola.
Scott Tannen: We understand that most of our customers are not buying us because it's organic. They're not buying us because it's fair trade. They're buying our sheets because of the softest they've ever felt. They're buying it because of the reputation that they have. Um, they're buying it because of the customer service we offer and they're buying it for the style and design. And we feel great about the fact that whether or not someone identifies as a, you know, someone committed to a clean lifestyle or committed to, you know, understanding human rights involved with the different products that they're making, they're still making a difference. Whether they realize it or not, their purchase makes a difference and the quality of the product that we sell is ultimately why people continue to come back to us and, and the impact is real and it's enormous.
Missy Tannen: But I think all those little, all these different pieces help us really create that brand and that brand that we were talking about before of it's not just a product we're making with a name on it, the more people learn about our products, we find that people just fall in love with them even more and more than they thought they could once they find out about how they were manufactured and how the cotton was grown.
Alex Barinka: Talk to me about that. Your brand identity matters so much because that is what you're shouting to the rooftops. How did you kind of, you know, take the sum of all those parts and conceptualize into something that is concise and that does resonate.
Scott Tannen: Look for a business today, brand is the only longterm asset we have left. That's it. You're 100% right. Anybody can immediately source any type of product, open up a Shopify store, sell it online, buy by advertising on Facebook and ad words or, or anything else and, and immediately, you know, have a market. So, so I think that the challenge with brand, and I think that this is what for so many entrepreneurs becomes a challenge as brand is not built overnight. Brand is built over time. So there are so many products that have awareness but they don't have brand appeal because those, the values don't have time to marinate with the customer. And the customer doesn't sort of come back time and time again and see, wow, this company, they said they were doing things this way and now look, they've done six more products and those same values kind of go through.
Scott Tannen: And that's something that means it means something to me, right? The market is becoming so cluttered with new companies and all these different categories and the reality is is like I'm competing with other bedding brands just as much as I'm competing with luggage companies and razor companies and you know, apparel and everything else under the sun because we're all in this digital marketplace looking for share of wallet for the customer. From our standpoint, we've really tried to take a lot of time to build the relationships with the customers. We listen to them, we reach out to them, proactively reach out to them on a one on one basis and driving repeat customer revenue is the single most important thing that we look at. Because when a customer comes back to you again, that that says a lot that says that you met their needs from a product stand point, you met their needs from a services standpoint, they understand why you're doing what you're doing and, and, and what your brand is all about. And I think that if you look at the way venture capitalists look at businesses, they're always looking at a customer acquisition costs to LTV ratio, right? So they're looking at things like, well what's your new customer growth? And they're never thinking about long term repeat customers. And that's the difference between building a business that's designed to be sold, building the business that's designed to be just sort of like flipped out or building a business like like we hope all in branch, which is we expect it to be around for a generation
Alex Barinka: and, and I want to pick your brain on this because the things you're talking about are some of the reasons why we felt like we wanted to build their shop. We wanted to be a place where as the cost of customer acquisition is skyrocketing as individual brands who have really great, very narrow focus can have a place to find incremental revenue to get in front of new customers. We see that it's gotten out there or more expensive perhaps to share that message. And also the places where you can find scale before a player like us jumps in there, there are things going on that can dilute your brand equity. You might be sitting next to kind of not the best third party sellers or things like that. As you look forward in terms of how you message to the customer, how you get in front of the right audience, what channels you're preferring these days with your background in marketing, where do you think the world is going right now as we see Facebook ads, Instagram ads, Google search, a keyword, prices going up and up and up, and those channels are getting a little bit more expensive.
Scott Tannen: When we set out to build boll and branch, and this is something we actually committed to paper as part of our vision, we wanted to become the first ever trusted brand in textiles, and when I think about vera shop, I think about a very similar motivation relative to retail, right? And customers are not necessarily trusting the opinions and thoughts of their retailers. Let's think about Amazon, right? You can find anything on Amazon and sometimes when you say finding anything, that's not necessarily a good thing because you don't really find what you're actually looking for. Maybe you're going to read reviews, but now you know, everybody hears that all these reviews are fake and what does it mean and what does it mean? And I think that that what appealed to us about vera shop was the fact that you were working with brands and businesses that you guys believe in and and so what you bring together from a customer standpoint is a collection of businesses and brands in a bunch of different categories that you vetted and you've determined, you know what, these are the best in breed in this particular area. I always look at like trader Joe's is a wonderful example of that. Trader Joe's doesn't sell 15 catch-ups, they sell one really good one. To me that's the future of what I would consider more of a mass market retail.
Alex Barinka: You have some really amazing stuff. What are your kind of hero key products that you are really obsessed with that have stood the test of time over the last six years?
Missy Tannen: We have our signatures off fabric that hands down is what we've become loved for and known for. So that's, that comes in different trim styles. Whether you just want our hemmed, which is a classic seven inch hem with a little update or a banded sheet set, you name it. Um, just the bay, just the trims have changed on that and it's always the same great base fabric. And that's what when we launched that we still have to this day and that's definitely our number one seller. But then every other product that we've introduced, we've, uh, approached the exact same way as that sheet. So whether it's our pillows or our mattress or even a seasonal blanket, um, everything is made with the highest quality, both in how it looks, how it feels, how it was manufactured, and how the raw materials were made. So,
Alex Barinka: you know, whether it's our pillows that have responsibly sourced down to our mattress, that's all natural. Like literally, I don't know, I'm obsessed with every single product. I feel like they're all my babies that I, I can't just pick one, but our sheet sets are certainly a great place to start.
Scott Tannen: If you really understand that there are two reasons you wake up at night, it's really simple. You're too hot or your partner's rolling around, right? And, and, or you've got to go to the bathroom. I can't fix that. When you think about what a great set of sheets do, they breathe, you're not going to overheat. You stay cool. And when it comes to things like your mattress, when you can isolate movement and suddenly you can stop yourself feeling your partner, you know, those are, those are real world impacts.
Alex Barinka: So, you know, in case folks haven't realized, spoiler alert, this idea that you had back in 2012 turned into a real thing, um, and it kicked off and now we're more than half a decade into the Boll and branch journey and y'all are, y'all are doing well. I love to celebrate the successes, but I also think overcoming the challenges are some of the most important things. Was there ever a moment or what was the biggest moment, cause I'm sure these moments happened to where you were like, oh goodness, this is not gonna work.
Scott Tannen: You mean just today or? Um, well, it is funny. You know, I was talking to a guy that I've, I've gotten to know and he's, he's starting a company and sort of, you know, I was just trying to, anytime somebody you know, has a question, so many people helped me that, that I always try to pay it forward. And I did say to him like, you know, look the, the number one thing I'm worried worried about today is no longer are we going to be in business tomorrow. But that was definitely a worry for a long period of time, especially because we self funded ourselves, right. We didn't have um, and, and really did not want a big sort of venture capital backed safety net that would also cause us to maybe make short term decisions that we didn't think was the right thing to do.
Scott Tannen: But there have been, there are constantly major challenges right. From a year in when we accidentally ordered an enormous number of boxes that we didn't need. Like someone added a zero to the end board box cardboard boxes when we were shipping. Um, yeah, we, we couldn't keep up with demand where air freighting, you know, we're, we're paying like hundreds of thousands of dollars in air freight just to just because like I think it was close to a million dollars. Yeah. I mean, what honestly, what missy and I are, are good at certain things. Um, math may not be my strong suit. Um, so when you have me putting together a demand plan and product forecast, it turns a little into like, what do you think? And, and instead of being scientific now, fortunately we have people that are far smarter than me, um, in many, many of them working here now and preventing me from doing the things on a daily basis that could bankrupt us.
Scott Tannen: Um, you know, again, it's like trying not to break Oreo. I'm trying to put that system in place. Like nobody break ball in branch. This is pretty special. Like please don't break it. I mean, if you about it, there's risk, right? Which is taking basically all of our life savings and sending it to India, um, to a guy who is now a dear friend. But at the time was just a guy, um, that, uh, and hoping he sent back a boat full of sheets in like six months. Um, that was risky. Uh, but where it got to the point was demand was so high that that we were air freighting to customers. Um, we were overnighting for free and we financed that all by taking five separate mortgages on our house. And we were like, in 20, 20 hindsight we were bonkers, you know, at the time I think we were just incredibly optimistic but,
Missy Tannen: but to how you were saying in the beginning, like, you know, you've got this idea, you're like, patients was not an option at that point. Like you are just going, going for it. And so I think, you know, we're both extremely driven people and persistent. So, you know, whatever it took at that time to yeah, to get our brand and our business going was without obviously compromising quality or the people, but you know, you know, we did anything we needed to, to Scott's point, like every few months or every half a year, there's always something that's like, okay, this is the next step. The next like, okay, I'm going to have a pit in my stomach but we're going to go for it or we're going to do this. And at every step it's been even more challenging. But then so much more rewarding because you're like, wow, we just did that in the last year.
Missy Tannen: And then we just did that in the last year. Like things that we didn't think were possible. It just keeps going and going. And so now we look back after five years of just making those decisions back in the very beginning of how we were going to source our products and make them to the best of our ability. We're now after five years the largest purchaser of fair trade organic cotton in the world. So that's something that obviously I'm super proud of that all of that hard work and what our whole team is driving for every single day is having this amazing ripple effect around every single person who touches our product from customer all the way back to farm. And, and I also, I do have to ask, you obviously are taking your work home, you're remortgaging your house, you're bringing home your sheets to a lay out on the dining room table. How do you maintain your sanity?
Scott Tannen: Um, maintain it?
Missy Tannen: No, I will say
Scott Tannen: there that it's, we are the most, I like to think the, the most family first people we can be. And so we, like so many of our, our team members here, we have, we have three daughters. Um, we have a family and they come first. Um, they come first, second and third. And, and so I won't tell you the order cause then they would get upset. Um, I, but, but I'm just saying it's pretty horrible. Um, uh, we'll do that offline. But, um, no, but the, the, the truth is that we are, uh, it's, you know, there's no patient on the operating table. Like, yeah, we bring a ton of work home, but, you know, we sit down and have dinner as a family every night and I, I don't stay here till seven, eight o'clock every night. If I have to log in at night, I have to, you know, miss these always call on calls with our factory at like two in the morning.
Scott Tannen: And usually she doesn't leave the bedrooms that wakes me up, just a sh. But, uh, but, but you know, we have to do those sorts of things. But I think in terms of maintaining our sanity, it's really about remembering what's most important. And what's most important to us is that we've got three girls, you know, our oldest is a freshman in high school and, uh, or just finished as a freshman and the, the little guys are going into seventh grade next, next year, twins. And we have a finite amount of time with them. And they did not sign up for Boll and branch. Um, they are, there is nobody that's a bigger supporter of bowling branch than them. They've been to India that we just took them to our factories and there's so much pride that
Missy Tannen: that's what I would say boll and branch is like our fourth child though I feel like it is just a, as much a part of our lives as our children and our children are part of the Boll and branch family as well. Yeah. Um, they have relationships with factory workers just like we do. And with the children over there, they've gone to the factories just like Scott was saying this spring break, we all went. So yeah, it's a little abnormal of a spring break when they come back and say, oh, I was in India, you know, but um, instead of Florida or something. But that's all part of their neat childhood that they've had. You know, they're included in just as much as we can.
Scott Tannen: At least missy and I are aware of like, I know when she's up against a deadline or she's dealing with something Harry. And you know what it means. I might scoot out of here early and make sure the kids have rides home from school and they, and we're, we're very lucky to be able to do that as working parents where we can pick up the slack for each other. Um, because we, we both understand both what we're doing and why it's important. And I think a lot of, a lot of spouses that work in different companies, they don't have that ability to sort of see really why the, the accommodation in their, in their personal life needs to be made by the other ones. So we have that, like everything in life is a team sport, you know, when, when you have a family. And so, um, as missy said that this business is part of that, that team
Alex Barinka: Today, Boll and Branch is more than just a bedding company. At Verishop. We sell their sheets and also products like their duvet inserts, bath sheets, and throw blankets. And in typical Boll and Branch style, everything is made from organic materials.
Alex Barinka: See those items and more of our favorites in the Finding Inspo shop at verishop.com/inspo. And first time Verishop customers get 20% off with the code INSPOBB.
Alex Barinka: Tell me where you are finding inspo from my conversation with Scott and Missy and I may read it on a future episode in a review on Apple podcasts. Ayyshortyyy said, "Looking forward to hearing what drives the passion behind all the great minds you'll be interviewing." Ayyshortyyy, you will not be disappointed. Leave your thoughts and review on your podcast platform or reach me on Instagram and Twitter at @alexbarinka or at @inspopodcast. This podcast was produced by me, Alex Barinka with production and editing support from Wonder Media Network. Thanks so much for listening and see you soon.