EPISODE SUMMARY

Tiny Organics Co-Founders Sofia Laurell (Co-CEO) and Carolyn O'Hare Batyske (President & COO) have raised over $13 million in venture funding to bring healthy and organic food options to children. Carolyn has over a decade of experience as a supply chain and operations expert in the CPG industry, formerly running operations at brands like FIJI Water and Beyond Meat. Sofia is a marketing and public relations veteran with vast PR and integrated marketing experience, most recently at Ascend Foundation.

EPISODE NOTES

On this episode of DTC Pod, Sofia & Carolyn join Blaine & Ramon to talk about company building, product marketing, brand marketing, finding product market fit, guidelines for each funding round, syncing marketing & inventory, building a resilient supply chain, building community, & more.

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS

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9:46 -Product Market Fit 🎯

It was a 90 degree day in Prospect park in Brooklyn. And we literally had a hundred plus parents come to pick up food from essentially complete strangers with unmarked coolers and unmarked cups. And we always laugh that that's when we knew that we had found a white space.

22:52 - Community = Real Growth 🚀

I'll give you an anecdote but we started doing these tiny “supper clubs” we called them, these community events with 15 to 25 moms- and they started out in person. It was meant to be a regional event, but we're still seeing that those zip codes perform better than some other zip codes. They became virtual and now we're kind of rethinking that model, but I think this idea of how do you do community or organic acquisition at scale is really intriguing.

33:42 - This Is How You Build Supply Chain 🔗

We try to keep a healthy amount of cover for ourselves, just in case something were to go wrong, which kind of brings us back to building for security. It's not a matter of if, but when something will go wrong, because it will. So to have as many backup solutions in our back pocket that we can, whether it's a quick ingredients switch, or a supplier switch, we've got an emergency solution just in case anything goes wrong.

39:10 - Forecasting Demand In 2022 📈

Demand forecasting is definitely both art and science, but we use that subscription data and a lot of really detailed cohort analysis to identify which of these marketing moments is the most successful. And when we repeat it and make sure that we're planning for that appropriately. So we use both of those in conjunction to kind of build out our demand forecast models and then we plan production and inventory accordingly. But especially right now, and especially for early founders, you need to manage that with the cash that gets tied up in manufacturing inventory. So it's always a balance that you're trying to strike.

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