Mudita Earth

0:00Pooja Chopra:Welcome 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.

0:21Jessica Chopra:it.

0:22Pooja Chopra: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. And 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.

1:06Pooja Chopra: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 usually feature CPG food and beverage brands, but I've been wanting to get more of the beauty industry, the skincare industry onto the show because there's so many interesting parallels. And also, I feel like these are industries that we could all learn from each other. Beauty, food, lifestyle, everything is connected. And we usually are speaking to a very similar target audience who wants better for you, cleaner ingredients.

1:57Pooja Chopra:So I'm so happy to have a skincare brand on today. Pooja Chopra, she is the CEO of Mudita Earth. Pooja, I'm so happy to have you on the podcast.

2:10Jessica Chopra:Oh my gosh. Thank you so much for having me, Kelly. This is, I believe, my first podcast.

2:15Pooja Chopra:Okay. Well, that's amazing. I love having this show. I mean, the nature of the show is to feature emerging brands and to have the stories recorded and documented. So I'm always honored when I am someone's first podcast. That's amazing.

2:33Jessica Chopra:Yeah, exactly.

2:35Pooja Chopra:So let's first talk about the brand idea, the product idea. How did you first get that light bulb moment to start the brand?

2:47Jessica Chopra:Yeah, so Medita Earth is a farm-to-face skincare brand specifically for sensitive skin. We grow the botanicals used in our products on our family and farms in California. so to paint the picture it's 2020 I'm living at home with my parents it's COVID and my mom and I have always had very sensitive skin I get it from her I would say I was at eczema growing up you know we get just a lot of reactions to ingredients so just like rashes redness hives and so my mom was kind of noticing you know like she had these like dark circles around her eyes and I have them too. And she wanted to, you know, use something, but everything the derm recommends is so harsh, a lot of ingredients.

3:34Jessica Chopra:And then because we have sensitive skin, it just, you know, reacts tenfold. And so, you know, in her younger years, her mom used to tell her to rub papaya, like the peel of a papaya on her face to get that glow. And today we know that's because papaya has natural enzymes that exfoliate and that's how you get that beautiful glow and so she was like let me just start making some stuff at home and so she set up this entire lab in our kitchen I mean she has every equipment possible and she just started making stuff at home and she was iterating again and again on me and my dad and then our friends and family and then at some point I was like, I think we can enterprise this.

4:20Jessica Chopra:Like this is really, really good stuff. Okay.

4:23Pooja Chopra:I love that your mom just went ahead and created a skincare lab in your kitchen. It sounds very COVID-esque of, you know, what everyone was doing. Also your skin is gorgeous, like beautiful glow.

4:38Jessica Chopra:I'm like,

4:39Pooja Chopra:oh, this totally makes sense. So what was your, what were you doing? I know you said it was COVID, but what were you doing or what was your interest to then say, mom, we can turn this into a business?

4:53Jessica Chopra:So I thought the products, what we would do is we would go to Sephora and like buy some products. I mean, we weren't going there. We were ordering them on Amazon or online. And I was like, this is your benchmark. So basically I got the Charlotte Tilbury magic cream, which was at that time what the biggest type was. And I was like, your formulations have to match this formulation. and once I figured out that her products actually were really good and we had some really good before and afters from other people the first step was um now we're like kind of into 2021 2022 it's taken her a year or two to formulate she even went and got her master's in cosmetic science yeah she incredible I know she's graduating in a few months with me when I graduate for my MBA yeah so she's a third master's um so she got you know professionally first she did some online training then she went and got a full master's now she's a cosmetic scientist um and so at that point now we're in 2022 i was like let's sell at farmer's markets let's see what people think so every single weekend my mom and i would go drive around either in la or in the bay area and set up at different farmer's markets it was so physical just like carrying a tent carrying a table carrying all the products summer it's hot and every Saturday Sunday even maybe Fridays um doing it and we did that for six months every single weekend straight and because we were getting such then a positive reaction from people um we were like okay let's we had already done the branding and everything of it we were like okay let's take it to the next level at that point we got very lucky because we got very quickly got invited to pitch to Walmart in Bentonville Arkansas okay right at the start of our journey like right in the summer of 2022 we got invited to their open call we were a made in USA brand um they were trying to uh support made in USA brands you know the whole their whole thing was like local economy and more jobs in the U.S.

6:55Jessica Chopra:um we flew all the way did the pitch got amazing feedback since then now we've gone back two more times okay and we might be going back a fourth time this year because you know walmart just it takes time um and it's a signifier within beauty especially mass to be with walmart and so because we got such good feedback that was a point where we were like okay let's not take this let's stop the farmers markets let's do like the amazon site let's go into retail let's go into mass market and we even like shifted our price point a little bit. It kind of helped us understand where do we want our brand to live and how do we want to position it?

7:37Pooja Chopra:Sure, because if you're doing a farmer's market, then to go, I mean, to pitch to Walmart and to be - Very immediate. Those are two totally different worlds. So in that time, were you also finding a manufacturer and seeing, okay, we have this idea, the concept, Because I feel like this is also what's very parallel to the food and beverage world, especially the founders that I work with in the really early days. Maybe they're testing at the farmer's market. They're iterating on their products. But then to make that into a commercially viable product is a different ballgame. So what did that look like to even be able to now be in retailers?

8:19Jessica Chopra:Yeah, so we found our co-manufacturer, our 3PL. Well, luckily, we had already been starting conversations with them at that point. We kind of always wanted to be, as soon as we decided we want to make this a real brand, you know, with burning and packaging and everything, we knew we had to set up for scale. And so we already got set up. The lab was able to make our formulations. We worked with them. Yada, yada, got all of that set up so that by the time we would have gotten an order, because in the beginning, you know, my mom is making these at home, hundreds of them at home and in her lab and everything.

8:56Jessica Chopra:So that by the time we get the order from somewhere, we can move pretty quickly. You typically within skincare, you get about six months between the yes and then actually getting your PO. And so we were able to find people who within the six months would be able to produce thousands or maybe tens of thousands of products. We paired up with a very big manufacturer who does manufacturing for brands under L 'Oreal to make sure that, hey, we're ready to go when it happens.

9:22Pooja Chopra:Right. And so for you all, did you know that you wanted to be in more mass retailers? Like what was some of that strategy behind how you want to position the brand? Because you are using really high quality ingredients, though you are at a more approachable price point too. Exactly. What did that look like? And that's exactly it.

9:44Jessica Chopra:So we were always very clear so my mom and i were data scientists by profession so when we were starting the brand we scraped all the reviews on like sephora and alta to understand what was missing and we would make all these charts of like price point and rating and clean rating and at that time what we thought was seriously missing was clean and affordable so all of the clean products you know like tata harper etc they were just priced at minimum at 2x our price point right um and so we that's how we decided we want to we wanted to sit in this like 20s to mid 30s range because we just weren't seeing a brand that was clean sitting at that price point the other extreme was there were some clean brands like Acure sitting you know in the teens but they used very few ingredients that right you know there there wasn't much going on in there and so that's how we worked backwards to make sure we sit exactly in that like nice little white space and so you all were able to

10:51Pooja Chopra:do that just from a profit margin perspective because you were able to do a lot of the R &D yourself or just exactly you because you were saying are you still using the herbs that you grow on the farm yeah okay that's incredible so is that part of the strategy of how you were able

11:10Jessica Chopra:to be more competitive price wise so um I would say the biggest one is R &D is in-house we're never paying for that outside it's all it's not you know baked into our cogs it's we do it my mom does it at home vertical integration of the botanicals is we want to try to inch that up more and more so currently we grow three botanicals but we have 1800 acres of farmland so there is a lot of scope to to grow that's incredible yeah one of the main ingredients we use is aloe and rose water and so there's a lot of scope to be able to just grow like the aloe on our farms and that way almost like, you know, across the products, 40 to 50 % of our products come from our farms.

11:57Jessica Chopra:The ingredients come from our farms. Yeah. So there's a lot of scope. Yeah.

12:01Pooja Chopra:That is so cool. So I know that you're at Natural Grocers. You are just going, well, you started the paperwork to launch at HEB, which is so major. You're at Mother's Organic. So what does it look like now in this next chapter of moving the brand forward, growing distribution. What is the strategy there? What is this, your point of view of now expanding out of just the regional area?

12:34Jessica Chopra:Yeah. So we have kind of two Holy Grail retailers we want to be in, Whole Foods and Target. and we always were pretty clear that we wanted to be a retail first brand and I say that because it's in retail the competitive set is so much smaller you know you go into a Whole Foods there's probably not more than 10-15 skincare brands on there whereas if you're on Amazon or you're on site or you're on Google you're competing against like a thousand skincare brands.

13:11Pooja Chopra:That's a really good point.

13:14Jessica Chopra:Yeah, I don't need to be competing against Tatcha, right? Like that's not my audience. I just need to be competing against the few brands that offer like similar clean positioning and price points as I do. And so in retail, we were always clear, hey, our competitive set just gets a lot smaller, eyeballs increase. And then that way we can finish the loop of like retails, Amazon site, et cetera, and make it go, make it like a circular thing for us. But our next steps would be Whole Foods and then after that would be Target.

13:45Pooja Chopra:Incredible. And what are you learning as far as being prepared for these opportunities that you're working towards?

13:56Jessica Chopra:So I know everyone says this and it's true. There's no way around it. You really do have to move the product off the shelf yourself. the good thing about launching with a store like natural grocers or moms or meyer is that natural grocers is 170 stores right so and they're relatively small it gave us so much opportunity to test different things we would send little sachets of our products we did instacart ads meta ads we did so many demos we even did aisle so we just got to test so many things and now understand what actually works with our customers when we did that so then when we did that with um moms it was so easy like from the get-go we were getting so many sales and reorders immediately and so now we've kind of figured out what works we're leaning a lot more into tiktok because we're seeing the discovery there is really good for us whether it's on site or whether someone sees us on TikTok and then goes into a store and it's like, oh, I saw this on TikTok.

15:06Jessica Chopra:And it's working really well for us. So that's, I would say, we're just trying to double down on TikTok for discovery so that when someone sees us on the shelf, it's not the first time they're seeing us.

15:19Pooja Chopra:So you're creating the brand awareness, leveraging organic social so that when they're coming to store, discovering you on shelf, there's this awareness. Are you leveraging TikTok to tell people to shop at those retailers or is it more so building just the awareness?

15:36Jessica Chopra:Yes, it's totally both of those things. So one would be like, hey, we just launched in XY stores, go in and like do different like meta locations. And then another one would be this is our brand story. We sell in these many stores, go check us out. Or just generally like we post a lot about what it is like to run a family business. You know, I work with my mom, my dad is heavily involved. And so we will like always dress him up in like cowboy boots and a cowboy hat and like take videos on the farms for us showing us where the ingredients are because really it's they're his farms um so

16:10Pooja Chopra:we do a lot of content around that too as well that is so fun it sounds like a tv show yeah it

16:17Jessica Chopra:does it really does i know my dad's video this is what i would be into absolutely his obviously his videos get the most views. Like my video has never gone viral, but his has multiple times. Next level.

16:32Pooja Chopra:I'm obsessed with your family. So what is on the horizon? What are you most excited about as you now really kick the distribution in gear? You got TikTok going. Like it sounds like you've been testing, iterating such great backgrounds of your mom and yourself, plus the family farm, and then your mom getting a master's in chem. I mean, just, I love it. But now it sounds like you're seeing all the pieces really coming together and working really well together. Yeah, for sure.

17:08Jessica Chopra:I think the next step is going from a skincare brand to a wellness brand. And so whether that looks like body care, hair care, incense, fragrance, you know, on your body, outside, like in your home, whatever that looks like the next step is trying to think okay how can we make it so that you see Medita Earth in multiple points of the aisle not just in the skincare section so you know like Siete did this where everywhere you walk in the aisle you're seeing them in the sauces and the chips and the cookies and so we're trying to see how can we leverage that strategy for our brand without falling into the pitfalls of like skew proliferation and then all of a sudden you have so many products and nothing is selling.

17:53Pooja Chopra:Which unfortunately we see way too often, but it sounds like you all are taking a very strategic pace as well and mastering one set first before going to the next, which I think is one of the things that most people overlook. They just jump into the next one, though you have to really master one first. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So what piece of advice would you share with someone who's in the really early days of having a product idea that they're not quite sure what those next steps are? I'm a brand strategist for CPG Food and Beverage founders. So I'm working with founders when they just have the idea and I'm helping them create the foundation from the really early days.

18:38Pooja Chopra:But I love asking founders like yourself who are doing it, but still early enough where things are really fresh on your mind. So I would love to hear anything of like a lesson learned or anything, especially with your launches recently. I think the one thing that we struggled with a lot, which I think we could have done a lot better, was packaging.