Inside Playfield's First Year Of Business

0:00Hey, business besties. Welcome back to the Female Founder World Podcast. I'm Jasmine. I'm the host of the show. I'm the person behind all things Female Founder World. And today I'm chatting with Ivana Tay. She's the founder of Playfield. Welcome to the show. Thanks. I'm super excited to be here. Okay. For people that don't know Playfield, what's your like elevator pitch? How do you explain to people what it is that you're doing? Yep. So Playfield focuses on human-centric accessories for pet lovers. So we started with our signature dog walking bag and treat pouch combo called the Bailey Kit. And our vision is to do so much more within the pet space.

0:33Okay, we're going to talk through your story, all of the stuff that's working, what's not working. But first, let's help people kind of like understand where you are in the business right now. You launched about a year ago, but you've been working on it for a few years before that. Are there any like milestones that you want to share just to help people understand where things are going and where they're at now? Yes. So we launched in April 2024 officially. Hadn't done anything kind of leading up to that point in terms of marketing. We're in a couple independent retail stores right now. We're selling primarily direct to consumer.

1:04We hit six figures in revenue before our year was the first year was over. We are in the process of onboarding with a big online retailer right now. Congratulations. Thank you. Yeah, it's so exciting. We've been featured on British Vogue. We've had a really cool partnership with a celebrity. We're actually gearing up for our first to exhibit at our first retail show later this year. So kind of a lot on the go right now. That's a really busy first year. Yeah. Congrats. I need a vacation. I want to know what the big vision is. Like what are you, what are you building here? Yeah. So the idea is pets are so integral in our lives.

1:44Like we have a dog named Bailey and she was the main inspiration for all of this. And I really think that there are ways to do things differently with a lot of intention and a lot of thought behind products and services. So right now, obviously we're quite small. We've launched with essentially like one SKU, but the vision is to do a lot more within pet overall, extending beyond products, going to services, thinking about brick and mortar locations. That's like a much longer term vision for the brand. And so it would be an all encompassing brand. You were at Google before you started the business, right?

2:20Yes, I was for eight years. So what was the, you quit your job at Google to like start working on this? Kind of. Yeah. So I left Google in the middle of the pandemic. I think at that point, I always knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur. And I frankly thought I was going to leave Google after five years, five years turned into eight. And then the pandemic hit and in my spare time, I was reading a lot about other entrepreneurs and how they had gotten their start. I was binge listening and PR is how I built this. I knew I wanted to do something, but I didn't know what that thing was going to be. So I actually left Google and took some time off.

2:58I didn't go straight into working on the business. I kind of needed to detach from screens and thinking about work. So I had a brief stint as a Pilates instructor for a bit. I really wanted to focus on health and wellness. And then when I moved up to Canada with my husband, we got a dog named our dog Bailey and then she was kind of the inspiration for everything and after bringing her into our lives I realized that a lot of the things in the pet space were either just not really well made or they're not super functional or they didn't look great or didn't have the aesthetic that I wanted and that was kind of that launch point for me to say hey I think there's something we could build here and I have a really specific idea that I want to bring to life and that's how Playfield came to be.

3:41What was your first product? So it's the Bailey kit, which is our dog walking bag and treat pouch combination. But it's unique in that it's hyper functional, super modular, and basically works with any outfit. You know, you can like wear it out to go to brunch with the girls afterwards, walk your dog. So meant to kind of just transition well between your everyday. I'm always curious about launching and what it costs to kind of like get a thing out into the world creating physical products is really expensive your branding is so good your website is amazing like you look like a brand that's been around longer than a year and people should go and check out your website actually because I think it's just like it's really great I'll put the link in the show notes can you talk me through what your launch budget was what you spent or like some of those key things that you spent on and your thoughts on that now that you're kind of like a year down the road?

4:35Yes. So in the beginning I had an idea, but I didn't know how to bring it to life. I had worked with a lot of e-commerce brands before when I was at Google. So I helped them grow online, but I didn't know a thing about manufacturing and I certainly did not know how to sew. I tried, but it was horrible. I was like, okay, I need to hire a product designer. So I actually, I get a lot of questions on this from people. Like how did you find a manufacturer? And it actually started with a product designer. So I interviewed a ton of candidates on Upwork and I also talked to a couple product design firms, but the product design firms are really expensive.

5:07Like starting off, it's going to be at least$20 ,000 and I wasn't going to spend that much. So I found someone on Upwork who actually was not responsive there. So I found his portfolio on Coraflot, which is a product design. It's like a portfolio for - What's it called? Coraflot. Okay, I'm going to put the link in the show notes. I've never heard of that. Yeah, so I found him there and I reached out to him and ended up hiring him. So he had worked with a lot of other outdoor bag brands before. And that's exactly that was the expertise that I wanted. So I hired him. I think it was about$3 ,000 to put together to work through initial design, kind of prototyping, and then putting the tech sheet together to then send to the manufacturer, which has all the details about which fabrics you're using, exact dimensions, all that information.

5:55He had existing relationships with a manufacturer overseas in Vietnam. They had worked together at North Face. So they had a relationship that spanned, I think, at least two decades. And when I met with them over Zoom, it was sort of like, I don't really need to interview anyone else. I think you guys, I want to work with you. Yeah. So that was how that started. We did also build our website. That, I want to say, we spent about$6 ,000 on. I had hired an agency to build the website. and my friend Hannah, who actually started her own branding agency in New York. What's the agency called? It's called Color Brand.

6:32So definitely check her out because she does amazing work. But I was her first official client, and we collaborated quite a bit to bring the Playfield vision to life. We had also rebranded three times. So it's an iterative process, and what you see now is the process of months of hard work. But in any case, we had worked together. I'd hired this agency to build the website. I want to say, Owen, we probably spent about$6 ,000 to build the website, which was built on a Shopify 2.0 template. If I were to do it again, though, I probably wouldn't spend that much on the website. Because it looks really nice, but there are a lot of things that are hard-coded that are difficult for me to change on my own.

7:13And now that we're evolving, we want to add more products, we want to make the site easier to navigate. It's just harder for me to do that on my own. so for anyone who's building a site or thinking about that just keep it really simple I think a lot of the templates online even if you're paying for one a couple hundred dollars is a lot cheaper than six grand and then it's also easier for you to edit yourself you can make those customizations without having to go back to your agency or your developer to do that for you yep yep and definitely I think I knew this going into it but somehow I forgot during the design process because I was it all on my laptop, on my desktop.

7:49Always make sure that your website is mobile optimized. That's so important. And somehow I kind of like forgot to do that. It's mobile responsive and it does work really well, but there are certainly some things that would change. I want to talk about the launch moment and what you, what you did to kind of get attention in those early weeks and and how that went yeah so launch was I think different from other brands everybody says you should build up momentum in the beginning and I didn't do that because I had also filed a patent for our product and for the design so we filed like a utility and utility and design patent when you choose to file something like that you have to make sure that it's not commercially available or available to the public prior to filing.

8:37So I kept everything really tight and under wraps until we officially launched in April 2024. So when I did finally launch it, I really just kind of shared it out to my family and friends, my LinkedIn community, which is quite small. So we had that initial launch, which is really exciting. And the orders came in and then it went silent, right? Because I didn't do any promoting. I wasn't running ads. I was barely making content. And I think that's when the groundwork really began. So it's like, okay, great. We have products, we have brand. I think we have product market fit here. Like we have kind of validation of the price point as well.

9:13We are a more premium brand. And so then I started creating content, just like testing different things, kind of talking about our product because it requires a bit of explanation. People look at it and they go, oh, that's just like a sling bag. I'm like, no, you have to open it up. There's so many compartments. It's really thoughtfully designed. There's a reason why we chose all these components. So I started making more videos explaining this and I was posting on Instagram and TikTok. And funny enough, I like not knowing anything about TikTok, I made a two minute long video of me staring at the camera, explaining the bag.

9:44And by all means, like that shouldn't have performed, but that got about 40 ,000 views on TikTok. And this is when we had zero, like basically zero followers. So that kind of catapulted us a little bit more. I reshared that same video on Instagram, didn't hit, but I cut it down. I was like, okay, I took the same video, cut it down to 30 seconds, added captions, added music, and then that shot up to 400 ,000 views. So I think repurposing content and just like trying it in many different ways, you never know how it's going to go. But it was kind of that initial organic social media attention that then got our brand going and then got us into the ecosystem.

10:23And how have sales been in your first year? You can be as vague as you like. I know that's like, you know, feel free to tell me I'm being too nosy. No, no, this is good. So we did hit six figures before the year ended, which is great. I think they were kind of slow in the beginning because I wasn't running any ads. I was relying on organic content, but I also wasn't producing that much. You know, I wasn't as aggressive as I should have been, but then around Q4 was, I think for most consumer brands, it's a great, it's like, it's going to be your best quarter, right? And that was also when at that point I knew what kind of content was working for us.

11:00So I repurposed those as ads on Meta and that really helped us grow. Are you doing the ads yourself or have you worked with someone? No, I'm doing them myself. Good for you. Yeah. I kind of come from an ads background with Google, but Meta is slightly different. Like they've, the algorithms kind of, I don't know, like I've talked to so many people about what actually works. I think I've heard a lot of conflicting advice, but people often say you can just trust Meta to find your audience for you. So there's kind of two different campaign types. There's like a manual sort of campaign and then there's an automated one.

11:33It was called Advantage Plus Shopping Campaigns. I think they've rebranded it now. Which I think is the one that they're kind of like pushing everyone to now. They want you to use that. Yeah. So I think what you can do is what we're doing now is we're using the manual campaigns to sort of test content. Like you might have a video with three different hooks and you're just trying to see what's actually resonating. When you have a winner, and most of the time you're probably only going to have like one out of 10 winners, you then throw that into the advantage or the automated one and let that scale.

12:03You pretty quickly in your first year had a partnership opportunity. Can you tell me how that came about? Yes. So right after we'd launched, I think it was sometime in June, I noticed that Taylor Hill, who's a Victoria's Secret supermodel, had started her own brand as well called Tate & Taylor. And she essentially launched as a retailer of other products. And so seeing that, I immediately reached out to her team, just sending the Cole email, pitching our brand, and they really liked it. And we were really well received. And so we got onboarded pretty quickly. And we were included in their kind of July launch campaign, but we were still selling on their site as well.

12:43Is retail, like, is that part of your strategy or are you focusing on your website and G2C? Yeah, so our goal is to definitely grow more retail now. I think it's important to be, for us to be omni-channel. So we do sell primarily direct-to-consumer. Our AOV is high enough. And I think that's another thing. Like not every brand should be a direct-to-consumer brand. For us, our AOV is like our average order value is over$100. I think there's a certain threshold you want to hit before where like meta actually works for you. And so that's true for us. But since we are so far, we really only have one product.

13:23It's important for us to be discovered in many different ways. So not just online, but when people go to pet stores, especially independent pet stores where the owner is often the one running the show, they can really speak to our product and our brand and help kind of be additional like members of our sales team that's something that I've heard a lot from folks who are going that independent retailer route it's kind of like you have this you have this like ambassador team that you kind of are bringing on board if you're working with the right retailers and they love what you're doing it's like now you have these people who love your product know all about your product and they're these like community leaders because they're owning these stores that are like curated and beautiful and connect with your customer and they are selling and speaking about your product on your behalf in places that you would never be able to get to I think that's why Indie Retail could be so clever yeah exactly and there's I mean there are so many pet stores across the US and Canada and I think for us like really targeting the ones that fit our aesthetic fit our premium price point as well those are the ones we really want to hone in on and because we're pet slash lifestyle we fit in some other lifestyle stores as well we'd love to get into some bigger department stores also but that's part of the the longer term strategy so how do you find these retailers how do they find you or like what's your plan moving forward for doing this are you guys on fair we are unfair does that work for you not really I think not from a discovery standpoint so we have to do all the outreach ourselves which I have done but I'm not doing a very good job of it because it's just a lot for one person to do.

15:02The times I've been successful are when I've had my product with me and I show up in person to introduce myself, show them my product, let them feel it. It's more of a tactile experience. And then nine times out of 10, they make an order right then and there. So trying to do that at scale is a little bit harder. I'm trying to figure out like if I hire a sales team for this, if I work with a broker, I haven't quite decided yet, but definitely want to branch out into more retail for sure. I feel like if you get the right, like if you're really targeted with getting those stores that influence everyone else, right?

15:36And then you won't have to do the door knocking as much because people come to you because they'll see you on the store that they want to be like. It's like influencer marketing, but for indie retail. Yes. I think there's, there's probably an equilibrium point where, right, where you get enough momentum and that happens. I will also say the pet industry is very collaborative and it's very community driven. I think different from other industries where you see a lot of the influencers and a lot of the content creators and the stores and the brands all sort of know each other, but it's, it's kind of a wonderful space.

16:07What's the influencer space like in, in the pet category? Do you do influencer marketing? Kind of, not officially, not really. I feel like we've sort of dipped our toe into it. So I've seeded product to some folks that I think are aligned with us but more so like if if I feel that they genuinely love the product as well or have been fans we sort of develop a relationship online and that's been really great I haven't figured out how to approach it longer term but that is also something for the to-do list for this year I feel like yeah a creator strategy would work so well for you because like you said you've got this product that just like video is the is the thing it's like what like open it show you all the different things and how thought out it is and I feel like just having different voices yes showing that yeah would would work so well yeah it's it's hit or miss though so I've seeded it to some like we've had creators with well over a million followers post about us and I haven't seen incremental sales this always blows my mind right I know it's it's all about I think it's like loyalty and engagement within the community like trust trust is really important we do have some creators who are amazing and they have maybe like anywhere from 10 ,000 followers to 100 ,000 followers but they I think their their audience really trusts them that's where we see success so I think there's a bit of trial and error when you're working with different partners what about press have you been doing any press outreach have you worked with an agency nothing outbound so far so British Vogue found us on Instagram it was our photo shoot that caught their eye and they reached out and this is when we were probably I want to say we probably had like 3 ,000 followers or even less like we were tiny yeah and they found us and then we were also Marie Claire and that was through that was also organic where someone another founder actually uh Charlotte who's the founder of Alice Mushrooms yes she's been on the show yeah so she bought a Bailey kit from us and genuinely loves it and so she was featured in Marie Claire and then did a plug for us there which is amazing yeah I love that that's so good next thing I need to talk to you about you're a year old now you you know you've you filed for that patent but you're still I feel like you're at this point now where you're where you're still going to see copycats coming through yes are you we are which I'm a little surprised by because I think we're still so small that like wow people are copying us already Are you on Amazon?

18:36No, we're not on Amazon. So I, the initial gut reaction was like, oh my God, we're getting copied. Yeah. Uh, on this, on the other hand though, it's sort of like, if they're taking the time to copy us, it means we're doing something right. Yeah. So it's kind of further fuel for us to, to move forward. What do you do about that? How do you protect yourself? So I do think having like the patent is important. Like having the ability to potentially take legal action in the future is a way to safeguard you. If more people try to rip you off, you can contact platforms to have them taken down. So depending on what you're coming out with, if it's truly something innovative, I really think it's important to look into like what filing a patent looks like and just IP protection, right?

19:19I think that being said, it's also just important to double down on your brand. Like be aware of what's happening, but you know, focus on what you're doing because you're doing something right. So double down on that and then just keep going. I think that's really clever. Like, you know, every, I think every cult product that is new and innovative, like they all have ripoffs and you could literally spend all day, every day trying to pursue that. And then who's going to run the business and grow the business. Yes. But if you manage to build a brand that people just want to be a part of and they want to buy Playfield because that's the brand that they want to be associated with.

20:01They don't want the knockoff. Like they want to be part of Playfield. Like that's the thing that's going to protect you. Yes. And the knockoffs don't know what you're doing next, right? So they can do, they can copy what you've already put out there, but they have no idea what you're innovating next. So I think staying fresh, like as the brand or product developer, just trying to find innovation in different ways, constantly stay inspired. This is something I'm trying to do a better job of this year as well like instead of just working in the business really try to work on growing it and that means sometimes taking yourself out of your environment getting inspiration in different places go to a museum go travel just kind of take yourself out of where you are so that you can take yourself to the next level yeah because I think about like the headspace of the environment that we're all in when we come up with the original idea for our businesses and then you get in this in this like grind of building the thing yes and how do you tap into that creativity again once you're in this totally totally different headspace because a lot of the time you know you came up with the idea during like during covid it was like this weird time you have more more space more downtime whatever and then you're thrown into growing the business and then how do you like keep that innovation and creativity while you're building it or something like I've thinking about all the time as well.

21:20Yeah, I think in our community has been really great too, like community, customers, people within our orbit. A lot of folks will tell us what they really think. They'll leave comments or they'll DM us. We get emails, which is amazing. And it's good because you're having a candid conversation with them if you allow it. Right. And I think that can help spark some new ideas as well. And they end up becoming really invested in our journey and growth as a business. What are you thinking about for your product roadmap? Like what's going to come next can you tell us yeah so we have some things that would be add-ons to our kit we want to it's like it's meant to be built on top of yeah so we have a couple things there we're working on a dog bed collaboration right now and trying to not necessarily reinvent the dog bed but just make some improvements to it so these are kind of some immediate things on the roadmap but of course they always say like however long you think it's going to take double it and then double it again Totally.

22:13Yeah. That's actually really good advice. Are you going to raise money? I don't know yet. So as of right now, we're totally self-funded. We haven't even taken out any loans. So I think the first course of action would be to look into debt financing, maybe some PO financing. We may raise a friends and family round, but I think in this climate and given the fact that we're a hard goods business, it's just a bit hard to raise institutional capital right now or you wouldn't get the valuation you'd want. So I would like to see more traction and momentum with the brand. And then at that point, we might consider raising because we have some pretty audacious goals, which, you know, do I really want to wait 30, 50 years to hit them?

22:55Or do we get some jet fuel behind us? I think that makes sense. The last thing I want to ask you then is for resource recommendation. I ask everyone who comes on the show, feel free to give us more than one, but just something that's helping you as you've been building Playfield and that other people who are building businesses should go and check out? Yes. So I would say the biggest thing for me in the beginning was finding online communities. So Slack communities with other founders who are like-minded. Some of them are locally located too. So for example, when I first started working on this, I joined one called Lean Lux, which is on Slack.

23:31And it was just a group of founders, a lot of them based in New York, largely building consumer brands of all across all different stages. So there is where you can, like, you need to find people where you can ask silly one-off questions, or like, how do you do this? Hey, I, you know, do you have recommendation of someone I can hire to help with email marketing? I found one in Toronto that was called the journey. These have all evolved and changed over the years. Obviously there's yours too, which is an amazing one. So I think just finding people and building your network is, is critical. Something I do constantly.

24:03And I think it's just in my nature. I love connecting with people. So I will cold email a lot of people. I will DM them. I will reach out to them on LinkedIn. So I feel like I've built a pretty solid foundation of fellow founder friends. And these are people I can text or call or FaceTime whenever something comes up and we're kind of, we're all rallying with each other and, and helping each other level up. A hundred percent. I feel like that's such good advice because there are a lot of questions that you can't Google. And I don't know, a lot of the time you just like need someone else who gets it that you can message.

24:35Like I was thinking about this even just this weekend when I was like preparing to like come on this trip and like you know come to LA and do all this content and I was like I just need to message someone who is very in like a really similar situation as me who can give me a pep talk who's like working for themselves yes who also has a child who is like traveling away from them and I actually don't have anyone like that I need to go and find those people so that I can bring them into my circle and have them as that sounding board. Ivana thank you so much for coming on the show and Congratulations on everything you've done.

25:07It's so impressive. And I can't wait to see where Playful goes. Thanks so much for having me. This was so much fun. I just wanted to jump in and end the show with a quick thank you and shout out to all of our paid Business Besties subscribers. Business Besties bypass literally years of networking by getting access to all of the people that you need to build your dream business. You also get invited to exclusive monthly group business coaching call sessions where you can speak to experts and founders and ask them all of those questions that you just can't google you can cancel anytime head to bestie.femalefounderworld.com or click the link in the show notes for more