Boarderie

0:00Welcome to the Emerging Brands podcast. Sharing the stories behind brands you'll want to shop next. I'm your host, Kelly Bennett. I am a New York City-based brand strategist for CPG Food and Beverage Brands. In each episode, I'll take you behind the scenes of founders that are building better-for-you products and bringing them to market. it. Also, I talk to brand builders, retailers, industry experts, and tastemakers who help bring those cool products to your shopping cart. You will hear stories of real-life founders, their launch strategies, and practical advice you could use to grow your own brand or simply discover what's next on shelf.

0:42And the best part is you could shop all the brands featured on the show. This podcast is brought to you by Glimpse. Glimpse is an AI powered deduction management tool that disputes and recovers invalid deductions, winning brands, thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours back to founders so that they can focus on what really matters most. If you're a brand selling in retail, go to tryglimpse.com backslash trial for 30 days free and let them know I sent you. Now let's dive into the new episode. Hi everyone. Welcome back to a new episode of Emerging Brands Podcast with Kelly Bennett. I'm really excited to dive into a new category on the show still in food, but we're really going to be exploring the edible gifting space.

1:39And we have a brand co-founder and CEO who's really disrupting this space and bringing a fresh perspective on giftables that are edible. And really, for any occasion, I've been so impressed with their website of just how they have thought about every single gifting occasion and how their products fit into that. So Rachel Fositelli, she is the co-founder and CEO of Bordery. And Rachel, I'm so happy to have you on the podcast.

2:12Rachel Solomon Fascitelli:Hi, Kelly. Thank you so much for having me. I'm happy to be here. I'm so happy to hear that. And truly, when I was looking at your website, I was so impressed with how you curated so many distinct gifting moments and how your products are super consistent, but they all then have these slight shifts to the gifting occasion. And as a brand strategist and nerd about building brands, I was like, oh, I'm so excited to talk about the strategy and how you all are really disrupting the edible gifting space. So let's dive first into the brand concept. Could you take us back into how this brand and concept first started to come to fruition?

3:03Rachel Solomon Fascitelli:Absolutely. So Bordery started as the first company in the world shipping fully arranged, ready-to-eat cheese and charcuterie boards, gourmet artisan cheese and charcuterie boards nationwide. You just unwrap and enjoy. And it actually started during COVID. So my co-founder, Erin, was running a gourmet catering and special events company in South Florida, which was doing spectacular events for celebrities and athletes for over 20 years. And then when COVID hit, all the events were canceled. They basically were going to go out of business. And so they needed to figure out a way to keep their business afloat.

3:42Rachel Solomon Fascitelli:And they looked at their catering menu and they said, what do people like most? And it was cheese and charcuterie. And so they tried to figure out a way to deliver that so that they could essentially keep their staff employed and wait out COVID. And so that was when we met and I had a business and finance background. And so we teamed up and long story short, we decided to build this incredible edible gifting company in a category that nobody was disrupting. Nobody was really doing anything interesting and innovative in. And if you're familiar with edible gifting, a lot of, there are massive, it's a, you know, 35 to$40 billion market in the US, but it's mostly categorized by gift baskets.

4:27Rachel Solomon Fascitelli:So cheese and charcuterie gift baskets are a huge part of the category. Dessert gift baskets where it's kind of shelf staple cheeses and meats that you order online. You know, they take five days to get there. They don't feel curated or special or quality in any way. And so we saw this massive gap in the market where nobody was doing anything interesting or innovative. And we decided to go after it because really nobody was playing in that space. that's pretty wild to think about that you all were the first to do the curated charcuterie and shipping that nationwide right and how you all really brought that to the forefront that's again pretty wild to think about you were the first to think to do that or to execute on it yeah definitely and what's funny kelly is everybody told us that it was a horrible idea I mean, when Aaron came up with the idea during COVID and it was really out of necessity of like, how am I going to keep my business afloat?

5:32Rachel Solomon Fascitelli:Right. Or like, it's not going to work. It's going to arrive like a salad. So we spent over a year really working through changing ingredients, customizing ingredients, customizing and patenting the packaging process so that we could ensure that it arrived perfectly. And so we put a ton of research and development up front and the product took off immediately. So we really had to prove the concept because a lot of people didn't believe it would work. So it sounds like a big part of being able to execute on this was also the packaging. Packaging, product, so different types of cheeses that would ship really well.

6:10Rachel Solomon Fascitelli:Right. Half of our existing product line is custom developed just for us. The actual cheeses are custom to Bordery. The actual meats are made just for Bordery. All artisan stuff from all over the world. That is so cool. Okay, so you touched upon that you come from finance. And did I hear you correctly that you also had another business when you were working on this? No, so I actually, when we started Bordery, I was 24 years old. I had graduated from college. I went to Barnard in New York, and then I worked in finance for a few years after that. And during COVID, I actually was doing a business school program at Columbia on blockchain technology, which is so different from what I do now.

6:58Rachel Solomon Fascitelli:Okay. From blockchain to charcuterie. Yeah. That is so different. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So that COVID hit and I actually went down to Florida because my entire business school program had gone online. And that's when I met Aaron, almost like the first couple of weeks that I was down in Florida, visiting my family during the pandemic. And we hit it off and we started to really build out this concept. And I never, never went back to finance. And I knew immediately that this was a category we were gonna be able to create something huge in. What was that thing that really made you pause and say, wait, I'm going to literally change all my plans and go into this?

7:43Rachel Solomon Fascitelli:I think it was how natural it was for me to jump in and start building this business. And something that a lot of people do is they look around at what other people are doing. And I think for us, it was we looked around at what other people weren't doing. And that was the big unlock. It was nobody – if you really looked at this edible gifting space, which is maybe not the sexiest space, right? People are always looking at fashion. They're looking at beauty. They're looking for something that feels sexy to them. But I often have, and coming from the finance and business world, you quickly realize that least sexy businesses make the most money.

8:17Rachel Solomon Fascitelli:It's kind of always how it works. And so, and it's in the categories that no one's paying attention to, no one's innovating in. And we just saw this huge gap in the market. So once I realized how big that gap was, and it wasn't immediate, right? We started working on this business. I was introduced to Aaron and they had really the expertise in operations, producing the product from the catering background. And then I had more of the expertise in how, and I guess I didn't have expertise at the time, right? I was really young and I just had instinct on how are we going to make this a digital brand?

8:53Rachel Solomon Fascitelli:How are we going to build out all the website infrastructure, the digital advertising, the brand building, and everything that goes into to really bringing a brand and a company to life because people have a lot of great ideas, but the execution from a go-to-market standpoint is obviously where things oftentimes fall short. So the customers build this brand and really effectively advertise and make sure that we were profitable was the place where I came in and had kind of built that piece of the business out alongside of like the entire quality control, making sure that this was a product that we could develop at scale, the design, all of the product development types of Aaron and I really connected on because he had this incredible background in food.

9:43Rachel Solomon Fascitelli:And I had brought this element of this is what customers really want. This is what's going to be scalable. This is what we're going to be able to sell. And so together, we've always just loved developing products And dessert actually took us two years because we had to, and I guess we haven't spoken about this yet, but we recently launched dessert and that product took us about two years to develop because we customize 47 different ingredients. Wow. Okay. I want to get into that because that's wild just hearing about custom 47 ingredients. But before I dive into that, I would love to hear how you started cutting through the noise or not even maybe cutting through the noise because again you all were doing something different but just having people aware that this was an option right because the first two ship charcuterie boards and doing something different within the gifting space the edible gifting space how did you all get on people's radar radars I should say to even want this product and start building the demand for it?

10:50Rachel Solomon Fascitelli:Definitely. So it started with everything. The way we built the business, we never looked around at anybody else. We always said, how do we make this profitable? How do we sell as much of this product as possible and make it profitable? And so we started with, how do we prove the concept that people want it? And we worked to invest in all the advertising and building a website and doing all that. We knew how to produce it. We knew we had a fabulous product that we had spent a year evolving and developing into something amazing. So we started going to trade shows. We would go to the fancy food show and we would have a deck of all of our products.

11:24Rachel Solomon Fascitelli:And we would go to the biggest edible gifting companies who are now our competitors, right? And we would say, we have this fabulous product line. We will drop ship it for you. You sell it on your website. We'll fulfill the orders. And so through that, over the first year after launch, we got on, you know, William Sonoma, Harry and David, Costco.com, all of our competitors who now we still sell with a few of them as a third party, but we quickly realized that people loved the product, but we didn't own the customer. We didn't have a relationship with the customer. We had no ability to remarket to them.

12:01Rachel Solomon Fascitelli:And through working with these companies, I guess no shade to them at all, but they were not advertising and innovating in the digital world in the way that we felt was necessary to really scale a product. We realized how kind of antiquated their systems were, how they didn't realize how to be nimble and advertise in a digital world where, you know, people are buying things on Instagram, they're buying things on Facebook, they're buying things on Google. They had strength on Google, but from a real paid advertising standpoint, from an innovative product and brand standpoint, they just hadn't got, they weren't there anymore because they're 100 years old.

12:41Rachel Solomon Fascitelli:Literally. Yeah, literally. So what did that look like as far as you were validating with these retailers, but then realizing, wait, hold on, we really need to build out our own brand and do it in a way that we feel is innovative and of the times and will allow us to own that customer relationship. What did that shift look like? So that shift happened about a year after we launched our products. I was starting to get really frustrated with the fact that they weren't advertising our products in the way we wanted, that they weren't, you know, explaining to people what we were selling. Because to your point, this product was unique and new.

13:24Rachel Solomon Fascitelli:People didn't understand what it was. They didn't understand it comes fully arranged, right? They're used to getting a gift. So I had made all these videos, you know, on my iPhone and done all these, you know, kind of high production things in our, in our office that we at the time thought were high production. Right. And so, and explainer videos and showing it coming out of the box, fully arranged and all these things. And they just wouldn't do anything with the content. So eventually I said, I'm just going to build my own website and we're going to start running paid ads and we're going to see if it works and how hard can it be right at the time?

13:57Rachel Solomon Fascitelli:I think classic line. Yeah. I never asked anybody for advice. I never, you know, looked at what other brands are doing. I had no experience in it whatsoever. I just was like, this is what makes sense to me. So I went on, I think I designed the website in Canva. Then I went and found a freelance developer on Upwork and I had them build it for like$4 ,000 on Shopify. Then I started making ads in my kitchen. Like I would just film videos of the board being unboxed. Looking back, it's an ad that I would never run considering how big our paid media strategy has gotten today, but it worked at the time.

14:36Rachel Solomon Fascitelli:And we started running paid ads on Facebook and Instagram in 2022. And it blew up, like absolutely blew up overnight. Within two months, our website was 80 % of our sales. And we had, we were selling on Costco.com at the time. Like we were selling online retailers. And within two months, we were able to scale the business to larger than every single one of our retailers combined by like, you know, fivefold. Rachel, that's wild. It was wild. And we couldn't keep up with production. So then we got on Shark Tank and that was in late 2022 and from there it just blew up after shark tank we sold out immediately for the holidays um we were on oprah's favorite things list the same time and then basically 2023 was a year of just incredible really fast uh scale on through paid media all first order profitable because we figured out kind of how to crack this nobody was advertising in the space nobody was competing with us.

15:43Rachel Solomon Fascitelli:The product was really beautiful. It was really eye-catching. And in a world where everybody's advertising beauty and fashion, there is a massive group of women, 35 to 70, who are sending beautiful gifts to the people they love all year round. I'm raising my hand. Yes. Yeah. For birthdays. And the thing that we really focused on was free shipping overnight nationwide. so last minute delivery because all of our competitors were doing five day or something right you had and a lot of people are last minute and I think our product resonated with people too because it wasn't just a gift it's a beautiful hosting experience so the convenience of ordering this beautiful fully arranged charcuterie board if you're having an event was you know another 30 percent of our business is people ordering for self-consumption events hosting um and then the other 70 % was really gifting, which is what we leaned heavily into because that's where we saw this massive gap in the market.

16:42So cool. And then touching upon dessert, because I know that that's the next brand extension, right, that you all are getting into. And you mentioned 47 custom items, which I'm so curious about. What did that then look like? Because you're still within the edible gifting space and it sounds that you've built a customer base who loves this type of experience. What was different with getting into dessert? And then if you could touch upon the customization that you had to go through to really deliver that same quality.

17:19Rachel Solomon Fascitelli:Yeah, absolutely. So for dessert, we wanted to do something that was equally spectacular, if not even more, because we had more data on what our customers wanted. We had more data on what was going to perform well in paid ads, but we made it unbelievably a huge variety. So the largest board, it's a fully arranged board of 47 different desserts. And we had to customize, right? Like think about like delicate desserts, pastries, things with elaborate toppings or things that squish, like those can't go in a fully arranged spectacular display. It had to be things that were delicious, unique, artisan quality, and could be delivered intact in the same packaging, right?

18:05Rachel Solomon Fascitelli:That was, we have these beautiful gold trays and a wood board. And so that took a lot longer than we expected to create. And it has this smashable chocolate that you kind of smash this chocolate box and it explodes with pearls. So we created all of this because we wanted it to be just like a whole of entertainment type thing. You get it and you feel like you have this whole experience, all different types of tastings. And dessert is a massive edible gifting category. So we spent two years working on that. And we have been pretty shocked by the reception of our customers and new customers. I mean, it is blowing up way faster than cheese and charcuterie did, which is hard to believe.

18:51And part of that is because obviously we have this massive customer

18:55Rachel Solomon Fascitelli:base already. We have over a million customers. We're shipping over a million boards a year. So it's, um, we already have like in brands and a customer base. So, um, but a lot of our repeat customers have been buying it and a lot, it just has really done well, um, on social media. I bet. I mean, just like that cracking the chocolate box moment in itself, I feel like that is such a social moment and then having so many people posting something like that. Yeah. Ooh, I'm so excited. I want to like go back and watch videos of people cracking that open. I find that so satisfying. Um, any piece of advice you would share with someone in the really early days, they are maybe thinking about changing career paths or going a totally different direction and really going into a space that to your point was overlooked.

19:57What would you share with them of some advice that you found really helpful or things that you've learned that has been super helpful? I think my number one piece of advice is make sure that you're building a profitable business.

20:12Rachel Solomon Fascitelli:I see a lot of people go into something because they have a passion for it or because they have some type of purpose. And I think that's wonderful because you want to have that behind anything you're doing every day. But a passion can quickly turn into something you really dislike doing if it becomes challenging or unprofitable. And I think what we did right was we focused on, look, I'm not the biggest connoisseur of cheeses and meats in the world, right? But I love the product and I love the business, right? I love the concept of building a profitable business. I love every element of what we do every day beyond just the product.

20:54Rachel Solomon Fascitelli:And I think when people love something so much, they think that they're going to love the business of it as well. And they're two very different things. And so I think when you try to take a passion or a purpose and turn it into a business, you just have to be really aware that they're two different things and you really need to focus on profitability because otherwise you're just building a really expensive hobby. and that's a mistake that I see a lot of people particularly in this these types of spaces make a huge mistake that is really well said and something so important to differentiate of you could be so passionate about a product but also finding that drive within the business of that product and I really like how you broke that out because you're right it's two separate things and you really have to be passionate about the actual building of the business as well.

21:53Making sure the profitability.

21:56Rachel Solomon Fascitelli:What was that? I often say you could give me a different product and I would feel equally passionate because I love the business of building this. I love the business of D2C. I love growth advertising. I love product development. And I think I love connecting with our customers, understanding what they want. But if you don't love building a direct consumer business and dealing with customers, then it doesn't matter what you're selling. And that's really where the crux of it is. Really well said. I'm really thankful that you shared your insights and your story and the build. This was such a delightful conversation and something, again, we haven't really dove into edible gifting yet on the podcast.

22:42So thank you again for sharing the story. For anyone who wants to now have a great option for desserts and charcuterie boards, where is the best place to shop?

22:58Rachel Solomon Fascitelli:So the best place to shop is bordery.com. You can find us. Our website is our biggest sales channel now. And really excited for everyone to try dessert. And then you can also follow us on our Instagram, which is bordery, B-O-A-R-D-E-R-I-E. and we have TikTok, we have Facebook, all the channels. All the things. Well, Rachel, congratulations. Really in a short period of time, what you've built is remarkable and I can't wait to see what you all build next. Thank you so much for having me. You're so welcome. Thank you everyone for listening and I'll see you on the next episode. This episode was brought to you by Glimpse.

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25:26If you're a brand selling in retail, go to tryglimpse.com backslash trial for 30 days free and let them know I sent you. Thank you again for listening to this episode of the Emerging Brands podcast. It really means so much to me that you listen to this show, share it with your friends and support it. If you are a CPG food and beverage founder and you're ready to launch a brand, people want to shop, head to withkellybennett.com for the details. And as always, thank you so much for listening, shopping the brands featured on the show and following brands I'm working with. It means so much. See you on the next episode.