Tursh

0:00Tabi: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. 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.

0:42Tabi:And the best part is you could shop all the brands featured on the show. This podcast is brought to you by Hummingbirds. Hummingbirds is the go-to platform built for creator-powered retail activations. They're connecting everyday creators with CPG brands to generate shelf-level awareness, drive in-store momentum, and generate authentic content in markets that matter the most. Go to hummingbirds.com for all the details and let them know I sent you. 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.

1:35Tabi: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. Today, I have two founders of a very cool hot sauce brand that I've been following on social media. I totally slipped into their DMs and was like, would you come on the Emerging Brands podcast. I love what they're building. I love how they're building with family. I love how they're bringing in culture and flavor. So Tabby and Mina, the co-founders of Tersh are on the show today.

2:22Tabi:And thank you both for being here. Thank you so much for having us.

2:26Meena:So excited.

2:27Tabi:Cool. Well, thank you for saying yes. I really want to dive in first to what is the brand. And again, coming back to culture and flavor, you all are telling that story so beautifully. So Tabby, can you walk us through what you saw as that market opportunity in the condiment space and really this brand world that you're building?

2:53Meena:Yeah, of course. I'm happy to. Just for context, we're sisters as well and the co-founders of this brand. And so not only is it like one, a mother's recipe, but we're also sisters in this business together. Tersh itself is a small batch Afghan inspired sauce brand that really started in our kitchen. I mean, we're first generation Afghan Americans and food has really always been the cornerstone of our family, our home, our love language, as most South Asian, Middle Eastern kind of cuisines and cultures have in this in this realm. So our mom's green chutney, which is our only SKU right now, right now, was something that we grew up eating.

3:36Meena:And literally kind of everything, our flavor of our childhood, so many of our family and friends' favorite sauce. And so interestingly enough, when we both moved out from our family home, we kind of realized in our own ways that we missed like the taste of home. and we couldn't even replicate some of the things that our mom made, whether that was recipes or flavors, et cetera. And so we just really wanted to preserve her recipe, share it and honestly solve a problem that we had ourselves, which is just like young adults wanting the flavors that they grew up with, but not really always knowing how to make them.

4:11Meena:And so I think the main piece for us is Afghan food is just so underrepresented in American grocery stores. And we wanted to take a small, small, small, small piece of responsibility and kind of changing the connotation Afghans and Afghanistan in general has by introducing the cuisine to the people.

4:31Tabi:I really love how you're connecting those dots. And I'll be honest, it's a cuisine that I'm not even familiar with, even living in New York City. And I feel like I have a pretty good palate. So I really loved your brand and how you are making it a really fun, cool brand that's bringing these delicious flavors, but also introducing the American market to flavors that they may have never tried before or they could be obsessed with but just don't know it yet. So I really like how you are connecting those pieces of the brand.

5:06Meena:That's exactly the point. And I think one of the ways, one of the small ways we're doing that is through social, right? Being able to have this accessibility to us and our culture that makes you feel tied into the story. And then the second piece of it was a very intentional choice of marketing the brand as a hot sauce. Traditionally, it's called chutney in a household. And that word can maybe have a different connotation to every single person. So we are marketing it as a hot sauce for that reason to maybe bring in, you know, a curious consumer that loves hot sauce or has it in their, you know, pantry already.

5:41Tabi:To be honest with you, I am such a sauce lover. And that caught my attention. I'm like, wait, a hot sauce, an Afghan hot sauce. What is this? I need to know more information and follow along the ride because that, again, I've never heard those words put together. And so I like how you are making it fit into the American palette, so to speak. but also you are very true to your roots and your culture as well and bringing people in behind the scenes of maybe seeing and learning things they had never had on their radar before.

6:22Meena:Absolutely. I mean, speaking of behind the scenes, Mina, you need to go into our founder story because it makes no sense. Please. Yes, of course. I'm more than happy to. So as you can see, I'm a full-time medical professional. And then Tabby has a background in marketing and both beauty and tech brands so very different different professional careers um and before tersh we always joked about like what do we what were we doing like on our weekends like what were we thinking about like all we can think about is tersh and this chutney and this sauce um so but we love it but it's just funny that we didn't even know like what our life existed like what it was before tersh even existed so it's been interesting dabbling into both um we didn't expect to be entrepreneurs.

7:04Meena:Honestly, it just came naturally, but we're super grateful for it because it's a tough business and I'm glad that we get to do it together because it can be mentally and emotionally draining. And when we already have our full-time jobs, doing this has been something that it's, it's been fun. Honestly, it's been fun. Not only do we get to represent our culture, but we get to do it together.

7:24Tabi:That is so cool. I love a family business and I always love featuring family-owned businesses because it does have like that next layer of authenticity and genuineness of when you're doing it with your family. It just takes on a slightly different feeling too and I love stories like that. So when did you make the decision and when did you both make the decision of, okay, we've been missing this product our mom makes. We're living on our own but we have two very different careers. What was that conversation like of oh, we're going to start a CPG brand and bottle this amazing sauce our mom makes and start talking about it on social media and getting people to buy it.

8:11Tabi:That is a wild jump in general, but also knowing two totally different worlds that you're both in. What did that conversation look like?

8:20Meena:I feel like it was this natural integration. So Mina, obviously she's a medical professional. So there was a huge period of time where her time was spent studying in school, like completely focused on that. And, you know, I was kind of ramping up my career. And so we actually, I always say that it was just time that, that gave us the room to have Tersh. And so one day, you know, after countless times hearing from so many different people, you need a jar of this, you need to sell it, you need to be in farmer's markets. Mina and I, maybe, what was it, Mina, like April of last year? I would say April.

8:56Meena:Yeah, April last year. We're like, wait a second, you're out of school. I have some extra time. Maybe we can actually make this happen. And so we just like spent a day in like Figma, like just like mood boarding everything we could possibly see and be like, okay, it could look like this. What if it had a commercial feel, but it tied with tradition and heritage. And so we spent like a whole day just doing that. And at the end of the day, we're like, okay, this is a real, real idea that feels like it has legs. And I come from a brand marketing background. And so in my head, I'm thinking, oh my God, this is a real brand.

9:31Meena:Like I can sense a real brand when I see it. And so I think that piece of it last April, it kind of just like sparked it for us.

9:38Tabi:That was the moment. When you could start seeing the pieces come together of like -

9:43Meena:Exactly, visualizing it.

9:44Tabi:This is something here. So Tabby, walk me through the strategy of, okay, you saw the vision, you got a mood board going, like any good brand I feel like starts with a good mood board. What were those early steps that you took to really then get this out into the world and start getting it into people's hands?

10:05Meena:Yeah. Super scrappy, really intentional moves. In the early days, we are really focused on like, We don't want fast, chaotic growth. I mean, that sounds wrong, but we're trying to build sustainably, especially because we're bootstrapped and we're using our savings. And so when we're thinking about the early steps, it's as simple as business cards, opening LLCs, speaking to, I think I talked to like 40 different CPG founders. I was just sliding into DMs, LinkedIn in messages, anything, anyone that could would speak to me, I would speak to them. And it would always be with like very tailored questions.

10:43Meena:Like you've done this. How did you do that? Or do you have a blueprint for this? Or do you have a spreadsheet I could borrow? And that was like really some of the initial work. I think the research stage is really important. It's like the visualization stage is part one, right? Mood boarding, seeing if there's a real brand. Then there's the research stage. What are the white spaces, the competitors, like doing all of that work to see, okay, this is a really beautiful brand in our heads. Can we actually see it on a shelf? So talking through all of those steps and like Mina mentioned, we're first time CPG founders.

11:15Meena:I don't even know. I didn't even know what the word Coman meant. I was very confused. It's a whole other world. It really - There needs to be an encyclopedia. It's crazy. So I literally have a notes page in my phone that's like abbreviations for all of the words that I've learned in this business. But so it was a lot of research. From there, in that research phase, we also did a family and friends soft launch where we shared it with some of our friends. We just wanted to see what they thought. And during that process, we were refining a recipe. My mom, she's incredible, but she has no recipes.

11:54Meena:She doesn't even know what a gram is.

11:56Tabi:So fair enough. I'm Italian. So I get that. There's no measuring.

12:02Meena:You understand. Mina spent so much time with her and was like, you have to give me the measurement, the exact tablespoons. And she was like, I don't know. I have no idea. So they spent a lot of time refining what that looked like, what the final product looked like. And I think that was actually, it took longer than we expected because I don't know, Mina, I mean, you can speak to this, But I think that that piece of it's so important for us, something that we love at home. We need to be able to figure out how masses can also love it too, you know.

12:30Tabi:So what did that look like of then, did you work with a formulator also based off of your mom's recipe? Or were you able to take that to a co-man?

12:40Meena:So we actually just did it ourselves in the beginning. We've been in a commercial kitchen since we started. Oh, cool. Yeah. So my mom's been measuring with her heart for years. So we really had to get this recipe down. I was like, we need to know what fits in a nine ounce jar and then able to multiply it to how much we can produce. So we just experimented on our own until we kind of figured out the ratios, sent it to food labs, got it tested and all that. But now that we are planning to move to a co-man, there's a lot of changes. And that changes a lot of the percentages and the grams because that scale, we never expected that.

13:14Meena:That's something we were going to do. So we're just, we're working with it right now. You're working through it, which is totally fair.

13:20Tabi:And I love that we're capturing this part of the journey, right? Because so many founders who listen to this podcast are even three steps behind where you are now. So I appreciate you sharing that because this industry could feel really daunting for someone who's just jumping in for the very first time. So that's why I want this podcast so that we could share more of like super early stages. What did you do? How did you figure this out? So people can really hear each other's story. So thank you for sharing that. But as far as the marketing piece, were you looking for people who were familiar with Afghan food and also people who had never tried Afghan food before?

14:08Tabi:What did that look like to make sure that you were hitting both marks? Because I'm sure you wanted it to feel genuine and authentic and traditional in a way, but also you need to make it palatable for people who've never had this flavors of food. How did that work? I know you are a marketing expert, Tabby, yourself. What did that look like behind the scenes?

14:34Meena:I think it's the storytelling. When I think about how product market fit works, I think a lot about storytelling first. For me, trying to hit the right mark between commercial feel and culture is in social and storytelling. So whether that be on social media, we show our culture. We talk about our mom. We talk about how we eat the chutney. We talk about the recipes that we grew up in. And then when it comes to trying to have that commercial feel, we also talk about what it takes to package and label a brand. The design itself actually has traditional elements, like the logo is pulled from the national flower of Afghanistan while kind of making it tweak into fit on a shelf space.

15:24Meena:And so for me, the balance of trying to find where tradition and, you know, that modern commercial feel is in culture and storytelling. I think that's really how we speak to it. I mean, I wouldn't say I'm a marketing expert, but I'm definitely doing my best. You are.

15:43Tabi:You're doing it. And that's been your career. And I love how you are also challenging yourself in a totally different industry. that to me builds that expertise, right? When you really challenge yourself and like, okay, I'm gonna take what I've learned but put it in a whole new space,

16:04Meena:you're doing a great job. Thank you, thank you. I feel like we've learned so much the past six months. I mean, it's even been longer since we've actually launched but it all feels like a blur now. I mean, understanding who actually gravitates towards the flavor and leaning into education has been really important. you would ask like almost what is the demographic like who are you trying i was gonna say who are those early adapters yeah i mean i think about it in two different categories but i know this will always evolve for me the first one is like the young adult who is it's i mean it's a problem that we solved for ourselves right the young adult who moved away from home but is craving those home recipes that's like the first category that i think about the middle eastern southeast asian Anyone that like loves culture, grew up in really big families, loves food, like wants and craves that type of flavor in their house that they can't replicate.

16:57Meena:So that's like one piece of it for me. It's almost like nostalgia, right? Like anyone that's in this category. The other piece of it for me is like consumers who are curious about flavor and actually put themselves out there in cuisines and just kind of want to try new things always. And so that to me isn't like age blocked. To me, that can be anybody.

17:19Tabi:That's a lifestyle, right? Exactly.

17:22Meena:And so I know that in our case, we are considered a premium product, right? At the end of the day, this is a more expensive hot sauce for a couple of reasons. Small batch, you know, glass jars, just shipping. Like any CPG founder will tell you, you got to try and fix your margins a little bit. But at the end of the day, we're cultivating an experience when you're eating this. So I hope that that premium translates.