Smalls

0:00Matt Michaelson: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. 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.

0:42Matt Michaelson: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. 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 was just saying before hitting record that I've been wanting to have more pet food brands on the podcast.

1:34Matt Michaelson:It's a space and a category that I've been watching. I love the momentum that's building in better for you pet brands. It's so needed. And when this brand came across my desk, it was such an easy yes. I think the brand looks so cute. It's so fun. And Veronica Del Rosario, co-founder and chief brand officer of Smalls. So Veronica, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Thank you for having me. You're so welcome. So as I was saying, I really love the pet food space. I think it's really interesting. It's growing. It's emerging. There's so much happening, lots of innovation. I would love to hear from your point of view what you saw as the white space.

2:22Matt Michaelson:I know that you specialize in cat food. And what was it that you saw that was still lacking in the market, that you had this idea for a better solution? Yeah.

2:35Veronica del Rosario:So I won't take credit for the idea itself. My co-founder, Matt, and I met working at a startup program in Boston called Mass Challenge back in, I would say, 2013. And it was for my first job out of college and he was interning there. And then we became the first two employees at Thinks, one of the startups in that program.

2:55Matt Michaelson:Yes. Okay.

2:57Veronica del Rosario:Yeah. And there he was head of growth and I was head of brand. And so he was really interested in looking at like the next frontier of e-commerce and got really excited by subscription models. just kind of really saw that they would be ideal for lever pulling on digital marketing. And as he looked deeper into that and opportunities there, pet food came up. And admittedly, you know, when we dug into it, that was kind of why. But then we found out so much more about how messed up the pet food space is and how underregulated it was and how unhealthy a lot of the food out there that's positioning itself as the healthiest actually is.

3:39Veronica del Rosario:And so we saw that opportunity. And initially, you know, dog was pretty obvious to us in terms of where to go. But then we found that Ollie and farmers were already like founded and happening. And this was nine years ago. And Matt thought no one's looking at cat. And when you look at the cat industry, especially in food, it's all follow on to dog. They come very second. Their nutritional needs aren't really considered in the same way. It's just kind of smaller dog food a lot of the time and the quality just isn't really there. And options are pretty limited. And so Cat was where we went. And honestly, pretty solid decision.

4:18Veronica del Rosario:We don't have a lot of competitors, but they are, I would say, quite a challenging customer compared to dogs. They're really picky.

4:26Matt Michaelson:Are cats just naturally more picky about their food than dogs?

4:31Veronica del Rosario:They are. They are both, you know, very picky sort of creatures of habit and they're neophiles. So they often need to mix it up. And so like it's a really tough balance. And, you know, I've got three dogs and a cat and they dogs will eat anything ultimately, you know, and that's a really fair point. Yes. And so when we're talking about palatability for these different pets, you know, dogs, it's good enough to have various proteins. and some of the time it's kind of like, that's really just for us. Like I feel good feeding my dog lamb today instead or whatever, but they'll eat whatever. Whereas a cat often needs to be rotating through proteins and they're very picky about texture.

5:14Veronica del Rosario:So it's like a super specific customer. Um, and I don't think they're choosy. They're choosy. They know what they like and they, they come in with an opinion, which is not the same as other pets. So it's a fun customer.

5:28Matt Michaelson:Yeah, they sound a little bougie. They like what they like. And so what was that initial – so that was totally something that you learned while starting Smalls, right?

5:41Veronica del Rosario:I mean, we knew that cats were a general – I personally didn't have a cat before Smalls. Matt had grown up with them. And, you know, there's there's stereotypes around cats being finicky and picky. But I would say that we probably underestimated how much more complex it was on the palatability side compared to dog. But that said, like really happy with the decision, because I think, you know, when he saw the opportunity in cat food, like, honestly, I wasn't immediately sold. I was coming from doing creative work for sexual wellness brands, women empowerment, like subway ads about periods and vibrators, very like taboo busting stuff.

6:20Veronica del Rosario:That was my background. Right. And Kat felt like way less cool and way less urgent to me. And I kind of had to like put that aside and decide that like this was going to be about building a business with my best friend. And if this was what he wants to do, then let's do it. But when we dug into it, I realized there was like a lot of the same pattern that I'd seen before, which was like a massive disconnect between how people actually experience something and how the industry treats them or how the world views them. So there are taboos around cats and cat people, their stereotypes, cats are being underserved.

6:54Veronica del Rosario:And so, you know, obviously people genuinely love their cats. Now that I have one, I fully understand that very special relationship. And, you know, the industry is treating them like it doesn't really matter. It's kind of a second thought. Cats are the easier pet. Give them, you know, leave them alone, give them a can. You don't need to be with them all day. You don't need to walk them and you're done. And that's just not real. And I think what's been really joyful about the experience of having smalls is being able to shift that message, change that perception of cats and cat parenthood, and really speak to those people as someone who gets it to someone who gets it.

7:29Veronica del Rosario:So in that way, it's kind of similar.

7:31Matt Michaelson:And you were saying your background and your co-founder's background, totally different space than CPG Pet Food. What was that moment where you felt, I know that you were seeing the data and just the writing on the wall, so to speak, that this was a good idea, but I would love to hear what was that moment for you personally to take that leap and trust in going in a totally new direction?

7:59Veronica del Rosario:Well, so we were, you know, startups were what I would say was consistent in our backgrounds. We started coming from that startup incubator program, moving into a startup.

8:10Matt Michaelson:Right.

8:11Veronica del Rosario:When we were at that startup, you know, I came in to do branding and like big, you know, big word marketing. Matt came in initially to be an operations intern. And then he started playing around with digital marketing and asked our boss for$500. He was like, can I borrow$500? to play with this thing, Facebook ads. And this was, you know, Things was trying to launch underwear in boutiques. We were calling stores, trying to do wholesale. And he was like, or we could just sell it directly 100 % of the time only by using, you know, digital marketing. And it was this massive unlock. And then, you know, at the time it kind of felt like if you were a girl in your 20s in New York, it was pretty unlikely you hadn't seen a Facebook ad for Things.

8:56Veronica del Rosario:And so from there, we took it offline and did subway ads, which were really not a very common thing back then. And it was huge for us. We went, you know, we got covered in the New York times. It went, I remember that. Yeah. Cause we got banned from the subway. Um, and it was, you know, kind of very early days, exciting brand, you know, just kind of like millennial brand stuff. Right. Right. And so that didn't feel like a big leap. It was kind of more like, well, what are we going to do now? And so when we left, we both left and we were freelancing independently, him and Grow With Me and Brand Still.

9:32Veronica del Rosario:But he, you know, Matt has long had a very entrepreneurial spirit. You know, he had a little like bamboo bicycle company when he was in high school, like very, very like into starting his own thing. And so he was always looking for that opportunity. And then when he started to understand all of these digital unlocks, thought I'm going to make a digital native business. And yeah, I don't think we even ever really considered ourselves CPG until quite recently. We just always thought of ourselves as like D2C pet food. Like, you know, we didn't really think about it.

10:04Matt Michaelson:That's an interesting shift. And what made you feel more connected with the CPG space?

10:11Veronica del Rosario:Well, I would say that. So I like, again, And when we launched in August 2017, it was a singular hero product, fresh cat food, subscription only D2C. Right. And I personally have always had this vision of what we could be as a multi-category, multi-channel cat brand. And so the team knew that we had to sustainably build this business, the subscription business first. There was a lot of juice to squeeze there. And it was ultimately going to bring us to a point of having a long term sustainable business. And so it's been years of me pushing this vision forward and saying and them saying, hold on, we're not there yet.

10:56Veronica del Rosario:And they were right. Like, as a result, we have a very healthy business with the ability to play where we want to now. But I knew from the jump that I was like this idea of cat people not being spoken to cats not being catered to exists far and beyond food. And why should we only focus on the cats who happen to like this one version of food? Like not like. Right, right, right. Forget like we're not even speaking about cats that only like dry food or cats that need. You know, there's so many because they're so picky. This is a fraction of the market. And so I always thought, you know, we can do more here.

11:34Veronica del Rosario:So in 2023, we started to explore retail. And we did it really methodically, you know, I thought about like, what is the most conducive, like to our mission kind of channel outside of DTC from our site. And it was, you know, I thought independent pet, neighborhood pet, because those are people, those, those are shoppers who are invested in getting the best thing for their pet already.

11:58Matt Michaelson:They want a specialty. They want better for you. They're willing to go out of their way. That totally makes sense.

12:05Veronica del Rosario:And typically, either the owners or the employees of those stores are extremely knowledgeable about the products that they have because they're also very selective about what they're offering. And they tend to be quite well curated, a lot of these stores, compared to a Walmart who's got every kind of pet food that you can find on one shelf and no one knows anything about those products. Right. And so I thought, you know, let's move there first. It feels really low stakes. It's not some kind of, you know, operational nightmare that's going to throw us completely off course if we do a few stores here and there.

12:41Veronica del Rosario:And also an added benefit was a lot of those stores already had freezers in place because they're so ahead of the curve in the pet space. They know, like, for example, raw was a is a big thing in the pet food space, especially in these sort of like premium markets. So they already have freezers available where they can stick our product just to try. And so we started there. And, you know, as we went about doing that, we are now in like 820 some stores across the nation. Incredible. Yeah, it's pretty cool. And they're all sort of like either regional chains or Indie Pet, like national or sorry, neighborhood shops.

13:19Veronica del Rosario:and in doing that you know our retail team has sort of said you know if you really want to succeed in this space you actually need to be offering more we can't just live on one shelf in the freezer we want to be all over the store we want to fill the freezer we want to do a whole shelf you know we want an end cap and so that strategy sort of aligned with my vision for wanting to be more than fresh food. And conveniently, you know, it turns out that you can also do add-ons on a subscription. So if your cat is a cat that happens to need a mix of wet and dry, you can have fresh and you can have freeze-dried.

13:56Veronica del Rosario:If they want just a little bit of an enticement, you can have broth on top. You know, obviously treats are a huge thing. We realized that, you know, there are very, very popular treats in the cat market that aren't necessarily the most helpful. So like, how can we improve, you know, the nutritional value there, make them more functional, whatever. And so we start to expand out into, you know, other consumables, but still food. And then from there, and this is not necessarily useful for the retail side, but from a brand perspective, my team is like, I don't, we don't want to be food. You know, when somebody asks you, what is Nike?

14:34Veronica del Rosario:You don't say Nike is sneakers. That's just a product that they started with. I don't want to be a cat food brand. I want to be a cat brand. And that means, you know, we are at risk of category confinement, I think, of being seen as solely cat food, of solely fresh cat food. So let's get out of there and start thinking about, you know, where could cats use a better experience? And where can their people use a better experience? And where are we qualified to make that better, you know, to make that happen? happen. And so we kicked off with a bowl last year. That's gotten a, sorry, do I need, you heard that?

15:13Veronica del Rosario:Do I need to? Yeah. We started with a bowl, which has gotten a lot of traction. It's called small serve and it is designed to be like super ergonomic for the cat, you know, really easy to clean for the human. We have a, this is a sneak peek that, you know, hopefully by the time this comes out, this is okay to say, if not, I'll let you know, but we have a slow feed licky mat that you put into the bowl coming out soon so that we can accommodate cats that are doing what we call scarf and barf, or they're just eating too fast and then throwing up.

15:44Matt Michaelson:Right, right, right.

15:45Veronica del Rosario:So sort of even expanding on this eating, this food portion of things into the eating experience at large. And then you can just go from there because you can expand from like feeding your cat is one portion of caring for your cat. And so when we can move into cat care, suddenly you have a whole line of products that can be sold omni-channel. Some are going to be better served in certain channels versus others. We will continue to have our subscription for people's convenience and for the betterment of our business. And so suddenly we are no longer this single product, single channel company, but we are an omni-channel D2C, sorry, an omni-channel CPG.

16:28Veronica del Rosario:So that's kind of cool.

16:29Matt Michaelson:That is really cool. And I love how you broke down how you went about it. You and your team went about it because I know so many CPG founders get really anxious and they want to do all the things at the same time. But it sounds like because you all were so diligent with building out the subscription as a heart of the business, that really gave you the opportunity to expand because you had that engine running and sounds like really tight and right, you know, making sure that the business was sustainable to then be able to invest in growth and channels and having that coincide into retail. Yeah.

17:15Veronica del Rosario:I mean, that is really a testament to having a co-founder that complements you. So Matt and I have very different skill sets. He pulls growth levers and I build brand. And obviously he can, he's brand minded. He respects brand and that is also essential. But that dynamic has been really important because like there's a lot of trust in the other's domain. And so, you know, I would say that for one, structure matters more than people realize. So from the beginning, because we're sort of set up this way, we made sure brand was not a function of marketing. Like it does not, our creative team does not, and brand does not live under a marketing team.

17:53Veronica del Rosario:It is something that lives on its own and then creative sits under brand because brand, we very much believe that brand equals business, equals brand, equals business.