🥘 UMAIMAH SHARWANI // FOUNDER @ PARO

0:00I'm Sam Rose and this is Commerce is Chaos, the podcast for consumer brand founders who know that building a business is messier than the highlight real shows. Your supplier just missed their deadline, your top product is out of stock, and your competitors somehow just launched the same thing at half the price. Sound familiar? Every week we dive into the real problems that keep founders up at night, from inventory disasters to supply chain nightmares, because surviving the chaos is what separates brands that fail from brands that scale. The amount of love that is going in to each of these little brands to get the little bit of consumer attention they need for their, like, freaking hardworking, you know, founding teams to just like make it work is incredible.

0:44And because this is a part of the world that I'm sort of like continually, continually obsessed with, the amount of like physical logistics that goes into making all of this happen is just extraordinary. It's unbelievable. It's so, I did this thing over the weekend, there was a complex hosted a family food festival in LA. And I, they had a really great activation called the pantry that square and cash app were promoting. And essentially you download the cash debit card and order one, then you could get like three items from the pantry for free. And so the Paro Tarka and the Paro Fennel Seeds were part of this activation.

1:23And it's, you know, such a simple activation, not a lot of work, right? Like just sending over 200 units, like they're buying it. It's a great, They're buying it at retail. And it required so much work that I was like, wait. And my biggest thing, and this is like my founder delusional hat, my like life thesis is like, how hard can it be? So whenever I say, yeah, how hard can it be? So like, you know, and for these fennel seeds, I, we've been out of stock for this insane tin issue, which I'll tell you about. But I was like, okay, how hard could it be? I'm just going to order some tins that are like unlabeled, but failed.

1:59and I'll hand apply the labels on top. Like, I'm just so frustrated with supply chain lead times that I'm like, I refuse to give up marketing opportunities. So I'm going to like, you know, DIY it with my co-packer. And something as simple as that still, I was like, this was so much more work than it needed to be. And I recently heard this in like Emma Green's podcast, which I love, but she was like, I'm the kind of person that will always put things together. And like, everyone is always like, I have no idea how you did that, but you you did it because you always figure shit out and you make it happen but emma greed was like imagine if you can make things if things can work out with you like putting it together at the last minute or like somehow like you know i don't know if that expression is in english like getting by on like a thin line or something yeah imagine imagine like how much better that could be if you had more time to plan it right and i actually feel like as a founder it is so hard to plan everything in advance because every day has a different like fire that you're trying to sort of like, you know, I don't know how to use these expressions, like, you know, put out or something.

3:07Put out. I'm terrible at idioms. That's like the one thing in English that I don't know. I mean, I once emailed an investor and I said, oh, do you have a few minutes so I can pick your ear instead of saying pick your brain? Like top five most embarrassing moments in my entire life. check well i they called it out and i will never use that expression again can i pick your brain i also i feel like it's too vague and i don't want to do that to people but yeah fair anyways bend your ear i messed up on idioms on this call huh bend your ear is that what is that what you're supposed to say there is an idiom that is bend your ear the other day i mean this is like i don't know if it's gonna be part of the podcast we'll decide later but i'm like coming out with these lentil chips so i wanted to see like i had my packaging supplier send me like he sent me the dye line and i'm like what does it look like like i need to see it in person do you like it you got notes should we break it down bag let's okay let's do the review let's break it down what are you looking for well this is the first time i'm seeing a four ounce chip bag from this factory and i have already put my artwork on a dye line so now what I'm going to do is I'm going to print my dye line in this size front and back I wish I got more than one that's my first thing um and I also wish that it was like just this silver color so it'd be easier to cover up this popcorn brand but whatever um but now I'm going to go print everything out I'm going to glue it on top of here and I'm going to like somehow staple or keep ceiling and then I'm going to go to these retail stores and i'm just going to randomly ask people like hey what do you think about this amazing but actually what i think i'll do is i'll put i have a couple of different design options i'll put one design option on this side and another design option on this side maybe and i'll show it to people like random customers to be like would you buy this what do you think it is what do you think it tastes like what's the artwork on there now it's like he just he handmade made me a sample just random just stock material stock but the weight of it the thickness of it is is going to be the final weight yeah the thickness is great the matness is great this has like a civil silver foil printing which i don't want to do because it's expensive it's expensive it looks great i mean yeah i wish it got more than one but well i mean you know what you can do is just go buy some fritos that are in the same bag size and if you're going to like bedazzle it anyway.

5:40I know. We'll do that again. We'll do it again. Or maybe not, because we can talk about how no one knows what South Asian food is. And it's like, let's educate everyone. Let's educate everyone. South Asian comfort food. You're bringing your mom's Pakistani pantry staples to mainstream American market. Yes. Your first generation Pakistani American. Yes. And your mom made amazing spices in Ziploc bags. These are my notes. yeah yeah and now it's like a national national brand so you're good at spices and you love your mom and now your day i love my mom's food i do love my mom but i love my mom my mom's food more even more and and now you're spending your day so hypothetically you're like you have good taste right literally and figuratively and now your job is to glue things to dialogue new packaging exactly and then walk into a grocery store and bombard customers who are just trying to buy their weekly groceries and be like can you please help me my life depends on it quite literally how does this feel different from your job at Glossier I I don't the thing about Glossier that's so interesting is like I was a third employee there and I joined when I was 26 like I'm 37 now which is like I'm so aging myself but I was there for four years at such an incredible time in my career and I think like you know I'm an older millennial I grew up in the girl boss era you know like that was my dream always to follow these like footsteps of like emily and sophia moroso like my friend sort of relates the girl boss era to like in the 90s how everyone wanted to be in like a boy band and she was like it was a very but it was like sort of a period of time that we all grew up together myself and like my counterparts in my career where we were like this is this is our whole world our whole world is building brands yeah like we want to build these brands and bring them to people and build these universes and i had i had met i'll never forget i joined glossier after i was i was working on google shopping express and my job at google was if you want to talk about operations my job at google which i know it was they were launching google shopping express which is same day delivery in new york they had launched it already in la they had launched it in i believe dc and austin but they were now launching it in New York, which is a very different, you know, real estate than LA because you have no space and these retailers have no space in their back, the back houses.

8:28The way that it worked essentially is that our team, we went on board, let's say, Fairway, which we did. And my job was to essentially work with Fairway and their store locations in New York to figure out how to activate this partnership. And the way the partnership worked is that you could buy, you know, a pack of Q-tips from Fairway. You get it delivered same day. There's three windows, 9 to 12, 1 to 3, 5 to 7. And what Google Shopping does in that moment is that we have a fleet of contractors that are like essentially working for us. They are staffed in each Fairway. And so when they get an order on their phone, they're like, oh, let me go pick this order.

9:08And then they bring it back to the back of the house. we had set up these like Uline carts where you could have like the packaging and the label dispenser and the tape and then they like they hand it off to a packer the packer packs it and then they put it on a different Uline cart which is like the staging cart for the driver to come pick it up and deliver it to you so you could get your q-tips on time and so that was what I was doing before I joined Glossier how hard could it how hard could it be and this was funny because I remember telling Emily Weiss this in my interview, like one order came in for a baguette and tech.

9:42I don't know how it got through because like technically it was only shelf stable, like no produce, no food, but for some, somehow it got through. And so now you're like standing in the back of the fairway and you're like, okay, I got to pack this baguette somehow in a way that makes sense for the customer and it's not going to get dirty or whatever. And then I also launched Costco. Talk about operational creativity and curiosity. We ended up getting a U-Haul van. And this is the Costco in Harlem. And we needed extra space for storage, for staging. And Costco was like the biggest account. Of course, all the orders came in for that.

10:20All of the Costco items are massive. So we got a U-Haul van or like a big van. And we built a staging situation in the back of the van with U-Line materials. So like a car, a shelf. but the front seat was like orders that started with two the back seat was like quarters that started with a four and then because you couldn't leave cars over overnight at Costco we would like drive the U-Haul van from like the second floor to the sixth floor or something like every day like it was a true operational challenge but I like I loved doing it you know and like it was such a challenge to figure out how to do that I don't know if Google Shopping Express still exists today.

11:04But coming out of that role, what I really missed, and this is now coming back to Glossier, what I really missed was being part of the brand. And, you know, of course, as someone who works on the grocery side of things, your job is the operation itself. And the operation is seven days a week, 24-7. The limits we would go to make sure people got their order on time. This is why I always, like, have such a soft spot for, like, anyone who works at, like, DoorDash or Uber Eats or whatever. It's a very, very difficult job. Instacart. And I had gotten introduced to Emily through a friend. And so at the time, we only had into the gloss.

11:37Glossy had not launched. And so I remember going into the interview to meet her, just feeling like, I don't know what I'm going to say in this meeting. Like, I'm not a writer. I just only started following into the boss when I heard about her. I didn't know anything about it. And I remember going to the meeting, like looking a little disheveled because it was raining. I wasn't prepared. And she was like, oh we're launching a brand and we need ops help and immediately I like sit up straight and I'm like I can do this for you like I just figured out how to sell a baguette in a bag like I can figure anything else out but I had never worked in beauty before I had never been this close to building a brand you know and I was I remember just saying and saying that to her being like I'm really good operations I can make anything happen I haven't done beauty before but we'll do it and we'll figure it out and it was like the most incredible four years ever.

12:26wow what a ride and to tie in our boy band theme i mean i realize that i want it that way is probably like the founder theme song because we do want it that way but also wait that's so good i might steal that for my tiktok today which part of being a brand owner it's yours i gotta go like read through all the lyrics but i'm pretty sure we're being seen

12:57i wanted that way no okay so you launched you launched your brand um right to consumer in february 23 and you're moving you're moving toward retail right now but you're in specialty right and now you're a

13:24Thank you.

14:05Yeah.

14:24Thank you.

15:12Yeah.

15:24Thank you.

15:58Yeah.

16:34Thank you.

16:57Thank you.

17:24Brian.

17:54Thank you.

18:24Thank you.

19:03and that for you i mean it sounds like there are a number of these sort of specialty ingredients where compromise is just not an option right like if you need it to be made with key you just have to go do that thing because it won't be authentic otherwise is that right

19:24it sounds like for to deliver an authentic product where authenticity is like ingrained in the brand, right? Like it's like the whole point is these are flavors that are inaccessible through like what's standard off the shelf and somebody needs to kind of like speak in this voice to the customer. Some of the specialty ingredients that you need to source are not like you can't compromise if you need the key you just need it right like you can't you can't just sub it for something else and that has an impact on well yeah like the complexity of the supply chain that you're managing how difficult long it takes how difficult it is and how long it takes to stand it up and then like your unit economics and are there are there I guess my question is like my impression is that you have to be uncompromising have you been able to find anywhere that you can compromise and still like deliver the customer experience that you want to deliver.

20:22And you can tell me without killing me. I think that, I think that a couple things, I think, unfortunately, when you launch a brand, you have these, like, how hard can it be opinion where you're like, I'm not going to compromise on anything. I want this to be authentic. I want it to be 65 % full of key, even though it's$8 a pound, but very quickly you realize it's not scalable. And so you do have to compromise. And so I think like what I'm doing with Paro, you know, I think there's all, there's incredible brands that are selling spices. There's incredible brands that are selling other elements of South Asian food.

20:57I specifically wanted to create an easier solution that was more ready to cook, not ready to eat, but ready to cook in the sense that all of the materials were there. And what that like initial barrier to entry would seem, excuse me, that initial barrier to entry would seem easier to a new customer who wants new flavors and wants to try new things in their diet and they don't know where to start. And I think for me personally, like, you know, I think everyone will say starting a business is like you're finding a solution or for a problem that you yourself have. And for me, the challenge was my mom would give me these, you know, huge recipes of things to make.

21:34And I would be like, this has too many ingredients. Like, I know I can't do this, especially in my tiny New York city apartment and so that's when she started creating these little ziplock bags and was like just add it to water i've done the hard work for you and i was like this is perfect like i'd rather just have 10 ziplock bags than have to figure it out myself and so um i think when it comes to like compromising on ingredients i will say like the tarka is an extremely expensive product to manufacture like i spent a good 12 months last year and i would argue i spent maybe a little bit too long on trying to make it work like trying to different factories trying to figure out the formula doing so much r &d work and i think that as a founder one of the skills you have to learn is when to like press pause and pivot or press pause and be okay with saying like this this is not moving right now and i'm spending too much of my time on this and i need to do something else and i do feel like i spent a lot of time trying to make that product work and it's such an incredible product.

22:35Like, you know, my friends, I always joke that like, we need to keep all the inventory for ourselves because I'm scared it's not going to come back, but it's just like that amazing. And I have the loyal customers and I'll send you, I'll definitely send you one. And it's like incredible on eggs. It's so good. It's this rich flavor that really you can't find anywhere else, but I had to press a pause on it. And I said, you know, I have spent so many months talking to so many manufacturers. I can't get the recipe right. The margins don't make sense. It's a really big capital investment to produce all of this inventory, let alone buy the ingredients.

23:08And like, it's for a product that I don't have product market fit on. Like, is this still the right? Is this still where I should focus my attention on? And so like one of my big learnings in 2024 as a founder was like, you just can't put all your eggs in one basket, you know? And like if the supply chain was just, I don't know. So what I'm trying to say is that I hope that product comes back. I mean, I have a little bit left of inventory, but when that sells out, it's going to take a little bit of a pause. But I think that you do have to make compromises, you know, and then I started looking into compromises with key, like sometimes you can use like a flavor, a natural flavor to give you that same taste and smell.

23:46And that's a compromise that I was not willing to take because I didn't want a natural flavor on my ingredient list. And I was like, this is not what I thought it was. And so sometimes when you don't want to take a compromise, it means selling out. And it means like just waiting for that product to come back, which is not ideal. And it certainly doesn't work in retail. And I think like on the flip side, like something like our candied fennel seeds, which I also will have to tell you, are these like delicious candy coated. It tastes like a licorice, essentially. And it's a post meal digestive. It reduces inflammation.

24:17It's great. It's like a staple, again, in South Asian diets. And I feel like the one thing that I've always tried to do with Paro is take these like really simple and great elements of our diet that are so nostalgic to us, but just haven't hit mainstream America yet. And the penalties are one of those where when I launched them initially as a surprise and delight. So, you know, something that I learned a lot about in my beauty consumer brands, it's all about the surprise and delight of the unboxing experience. And so in every order of Paro for the first like 12 months, you would get this free tin with the fennel seeds inside.

24:55And I saw just naturally organically how many how many how much people loved it. They were like, oh, I haven't seen this in so long. The format is so cute. You can like take it with just anywhere. It's like pocket sized. My kids love it. You know, it's nostalgic. And then for people who hadn't tried it, they were like, wait, this is so good. And so that started my next like project where I was like, I'm going to bring this back as an inline skew, which I did earlier this year. And we sold out very quickly in like five weeks, which is amazing. But now I'm like, OK, I'm back to the same problem of supply chain.

25:30And in this case, what was happening was that these if you look for these fennel seeds candy coated anywhere in the US, they are made with artificial dyes. like I could not find any that were not made with artificial dyes and so right around the time when like we're having this conversation about red 40 as a founder I'm like wait do I continue making this product with red 40 or do I pause and wait to get natural fennel seeds that have natural food coloring so I chose the second option again I had a pause and I was like okay I'm not gonna I have to sell out. And I just was so curious and like motivated to find and make a version that was with natural colors.

26:11And so I started asking around. I met this natural food coloring co-packer or manufacturer in Atlanta that like one of my friends was using for her gummies. And they were incredible. They sent just like sample sizes, but enough for me to make my first batch. And then at the same time I was really one of my sort of core ethos and goals has been like I want to make something in Pakistan and I wanted to say made it Pakistan as like a Pakistani American like I've only been to Pakistan twice by the way like I'm 37 and so it's not I identify it's like I think having a cultural brand it's like so much about your own journey of figuring out where you sit with your like culture and heritage and how you bring it to life in your own unique way and for For me, I was like, okay, I went to Pakistan right before I had launched Paro.

27:02And I was like, I want to really manufacture something here. But I have no idea where to start with supply chain and how to figure all of that out. And I have no connections there. I don't have a network. Like my parents don't know anyone. And so I happened to meet another founder who's also Pakistani. And he has this amazing company called Pulpito Bites. And I told him what I was looking for. And he was like, oh, I think that I can probably help you. and so like he started working with me and I think it's just also an example of how important it is to help other founders win right and it's like truly that thing about like if one of us wins we all win because we all have the same goal and I thought like he embodied it so well where he was like oh you know he is front box on his family is still there he produces his product there and so he put me in touch with someone and we just got our first batch of naturally natural color natural candy coated fennel seeds like a month ago that's awesome that was a long story and you're selling like it's on their own so now now the second piece of the operation is my battle at all with meddletons coming out of china like i it has been so tough like i've as someone who also my expertise is operations i say this all the time where i'm like how is it that the operations of things that I'm working on for Paro are so hard, but I can easily do it for someone else.

28:25I think there's two things. One is like, I don't have as much capital as other VC backed companies that I work for or consult for. And I think the second thing is like, when you don't have a lot of volumes, your suppliers don't pay attention to you. Like no one cares about my five or 10 ,000 unit order, which I think is like still pretty substantial, like to order 10 ,000 units, that's an MLQ. yeah but it has been really hard to get um you know my previous supplier sort of way am I like also was giving me a lot of wrong information about the tariffs um and just sort of like saying things that weren't actually what I was reading in the news so you have to like sort of be like okay should I go with this it's a risk because I might have to pay an extra 80 percent um then I started working with brokers the 10 has been a really hard piece of the operation but I think I'm getting closer.

29:13I've just, every day I wake up and I'm like emailing my suppliers for the tins every single day. Wow. Yeah. I think it's hard to overstate how much, okay. So we've always touched on a bunch of themes here and the ones that I want to pull on more are ability to pivot. Right. And just like call it on the field when you have to, that's another idiom. Wait, what is it called? Call it on the field. You make a decision sort of like on the field of play. Of play, a call it on the field. Like a decision in the moment kind of a thing. Got it. So yeah, you got to be able to call it like and and then and pivot quickly over and over and over and over again.