Creating A Luxury Brand Dedicated to Radical Pleasure, Richard Christiansen, Flaming Estate

0:00Richard Christiansen:Coming up in this episode of Professional Jealousy. There's a real joy for me in, a real grace in regulating your smallness. Like, why aren't you guys using any AI for your customer service? I was like, we will never, ever use AI for customer service, ever. Sounds a little cheesy sometimes, but honestly, like, I needed to rescue myself. I was a shell. If possible, I would say never take money from someone who didn't earn their own. Just having my senses completely on fire is, to me, the definition of success.

0:35Richard Christiansen:Hi, I'm Natasha Jakubowski, Chief Innovation Officer at Anomaly, a global marketing agency. And this is my podcast, Professional Jealousy, where I'm lucky enough to talk to founders, business leaders and creatives that I'm impressed by. And yes, maybe a little jealous of. Today, I'm talking with Richard Christiansen, the founder of Flamingo Estate, a brand that I have admired and gifted to so many people. We'll be chatting about leaving rural Australia, starting Chandelier, an agency known for its fashion and luxury work, and most recently, of course, the creation of Flamingo Estate. Hi, Richard.

1:22Richard Christiansen:Hello. We're going all the way back to Australia. I mean, I don't know if we'll do much on Australia, But I think it's, you know, as someone that's not from America, I'm always curious. And, you know, anyway, before we go there, for anyone that doesn't know the Flamingo Estate brand, can you give us the elevator pitch? Well, Flamingo is my home, first and foremost. I live here and it accidentally became a brand. And we started selling vegetables. My mom and dad are farmers in Australia. And so I know the grind of farming. And, you know, I spent my whole professional life in advertising. And as you said, it's chandelier.

2:07And then this is not a short, I guess this is not a short answer. Not an hour to switch. Not really. I mean, it's a collision of multiple things happening at once. I had started an office for my agency here in Los Angeles. I also opened a bookshop because there's not a lot of bookstores in Los Angeles. Good bookstores. and uh and then i used to work the bookstore on the weekend and i was there um and a farmer walked in who i knew because i had bought trees from her i have a very flamingo's a very large orchard and garden and um and she said there's this thing called covid it's just happening i'm gonna lose my farm because my vegetables go to all the farmers to the restaurants and the restaurants are about to close and i was like oh nonsense we can we can sell your vegetables your veggies and My mom and dad had lost their farm when I was a kid.

2:55So I was like, you know, it was very personal to me. I was like, let's help her out. And short story is one farm became 10, became 50, became 165 now, keeps growing. And from those farmers just kept pulling everything they were growing and started selling vegetables out of my bookshop the very first Friday of COVID. And the next Friday, we doubled that number. and the next Friday we doubled that number. And so we kind of stumbled across this wild vegetable business. But I'd really cut my teeth on luxury brands and my partner had to and we made everything look beautiful and packaged it perfectly and this thing just exploded.

3:42It just exploded in the most wonderful way. The money was going back to the farms. We were meeting lots of incredible people. At a time for me, we'll probably talk about this later, where I really needed that kind of wholesomeness and honesty. And then sort of maybe a year into it or two years into it, this wonderful guy, Oliver, came here who had an olive farm. And he said, you know, could you help me out? I hear you're helping farmers out. And I said, we have enough olive oil and we don't need any more. And then as he's leaving, I was like, actually, maybe we can make soap from your olive oil.

4:17And so today, and that kind of was a big turning point. Yeah. Today, bath and body products, beauty products, soap and soon fragrance isn't about 90 percent of what we do. Amazing. And the company has just, you know, it's it's exploded in financially in a way I could never have dreamed of. And in a distribution I could never have dreamed of in five years. And so and we'll talk more about that, I'm sure. But so anyway, short answer. Yeah. We started making things in my home from farmers that we met and stumbled into something really interesting, which I'm very proud of, actually.

4:57Richard Christiansen:It's amazing. I mean, yeah, I love the idea of the accidental business that then grew. Like, what was the moment that you realized it went from kind of helping out the farmers and selling through COVID to actually this could be my own business, my own brand? I just think the volume at which we, I've built brands and rescue brands my whole life. I think the volume at which it just, the wind hit the sails so quickly. And people, I think this kind of brand could never exist outside Los Angeles, I think, because our adjacency to Hollywood was very important. People were gifting it. People who had a lot of following were sort of talking about it.

5:40There's a lot of goodwill here for us. You know, we were genuinely helping out hundreds of farmers. And, you know, one point in the vegetable part of the journey, although we still sell vegetables, But when we were just doing that, we had to rent out Universal Studios or somewhere like that because we needed a space large enough for all these trucks to come with their vegetables that was COVID safe, that was covered, that we could pick and pack vegetables on a Thursday to sell and deliver on a Friday. And that was such a full circle moment for me because I had filmed TV commercials in the backlots here.

6:15I'd done, you know, silly, silly, other silly jobs for brands that we were creating fake narratives. And here we were picking out carrots. So it was wonderful. It was that first two years, let's say, under the protective bubble of COVID was just joyful for us. Yeah. And then and I think maybe the other point that I really felt like, oh, something's happened is we got it. We got a visit from this amazing, amazing entrepreneur in Australia, Joe Horgan and her colleague Marita Burke. They really run this business in Australia called Mecca. If you're Australian, everyone knows Mecca. It's like Sephora, but much better.

6:55And the best retailer in Australia, I think. And big, big, big beauty business. Huge in every city in the country. and um they came here and they said i think there's something interesting going on in in the industry we're seeing this collision of beauty nutrition wellness yeah and a sourcing acumen no one can deliver on it because no one's making stuff that way you know they're making stuff in a laboratory they're making they're using contract ingredients they they're not you know most beauty brands as you know don't even touch their products that you know it's all outsourced um i said you know you're doing you're you're one of the only people we can think of who's who can actually deliver on it because you're actually making stuff that way yeah you're pulling food grade ingredients and you're making hand soap from it and that really was sort of how this this sort of skew assortment started we will make i think we made 150 products in our first year which is on it's such a yes but people would come to the house and they say like oh i've got seven acres of sage what can you make from it and oh i've got 18 acres of lavender what can you make with it and i would just think let's make shampoo how hard can that be and we'd figure out a way to make shampoo and so thank god we've we're not mixing markets anymore but um at its core we're still doing the same thing you know which is from the business point of view um really the opposite way most businesses work most people start like i want to make a product how do i how do i do it we were like oh we've got all the stuff what can we make from it so it was the complete upside down way of approaching a brand and it was super counterintuitive of what i had learned and

8:29Richard Christiansen:done for other people well I was gonna ask about that like what what are the things that you know chandelier is so well known for its work in fashion and luxury like what are the things that you did take on like I'm assuming like the the world building is something that obviously I can see from that work and then the other stuff that you had to kind of reject because it it wasn't right I think I say I've said this before to a lot of you know a lot of my colleagues and friends the I was I was at the helm of chandelier for most of my adult life you know I'm not there now um but you know for 20 years I was in New York I was and anyone that works in the industry as you know like it's it's a service industry you're hustling you're always pitching you're always running um and people would come to us very big brands very small brands you know luxury brands tech brands and we know whether you were apple or whether you were hermes whoever you were i in my full heart i can tell you this people came to us with different briefs but they all had the same problem and they all had the same secret question which was how do you help us act small yeah because i think they had all got to in one way or another too big to be um funny too safe to be vulnerable, too afraid to be humorous.

9:58They just were, their size always started to get in the way. I swear to you, we all have seen that. Self-conscious. They got too self-conscious, yeah. And they, not be small, they were big businesses, but they needed to act small and act personal. And so, and I think for me, just seeing that again and again and again and again and getting so frustrated when people wouldn't listen or take their medicine. You must have seen that too. You know, I thought if I ever started my own thing, if that ever happened, I would be just fiercely, fiercely, fiercely obsessed with acting small. And, you know, and then that means like how you function in the office.

10:39It means how you function to, you know, your customers, how you make products. And so, and it's sort of something I'm continuing to be obsessed with. I think it happens to people as well as businesses. I think when you start to get too big for your britches, you start to lose your magic. And so there's a joy, there's a real joy for me and a real grace in regulating your smallness. Yeah. And I'm a huge, huge believer in it.

11:10Richard Christiansen:I thought it was interesting because you have said that you're going to make this a billion-dollar brand. Like, so how do you scale while still staying small, not selling out, becoming self-conscious, becoming, you know, letting go of all the things that make it so, you know, so desirable? It's a really, it's a time relevant question. We are, you know, we learned so much. And I think that, and we've also definitely grown up as a business. And, you know, we're across Australia. We enter Japan next week. We open there next week. We're across America. We've scaled quite quickly. And with that has come those complexities that I used to get annoyed at from other people.

12:01It really is a very true thing. I think the, but at its core for me, the core team is quite small and very intimate. People joke, I still write all the social media copy. I write all the website copy. I write all of it. My partner hardly designs all of it. We will never acquiesce that to, or delegate that to someone else. We make, you know, we only make stuff we use at home. And, and more and more and more, like really trying to make sure that the, the team stays is like very close and personal. And so we, and it's interesting, we had a board meeting yesterday in Ambassadors or like, why are you guys using any AI for your customer service?

12:40I was like, we will never, ever use AI for customer service ever. And so, you know, that's like, we're not outsourcing anything. We make our own stuff. We don't have a 3PL. We have, you know, we have our own warehouse where we ship stuff, you know. We're trying really hard to hang on to all the pieces. I think, I don't think there's one thing. I think it's just a real attention to the small things. And we're so fiercely eagle-eyed on it. It sounds silly and simple, but maybe it is simple. It's also complicated at the same time. I think there's this, with Flamingo, I really feel like there's this collision of something very old and very new breaking through at the same time.

13:22You know, making stuff the way grandma used to make it, whether it's food or whether that's stuff for your home. and trying to think about new ways to package it and sell it. And, you know, my mom and dad are farmers and horticulturalists and environmentalists. And I think one, I'd like to build Flamingo to be a billion dollar brand. I'd say that a lot. Not because I want, not because I'm a tech, not because I'm a finance bro and I don't care about the eggs or any of that stuff. It's because I really do want to turn around to Lauder and L 'Oreal and those big... And show it can be done. And like raise my big middle fingers and say like, You can leave the world better than you found it.

13:57You don't need to use palm oil for everything. You can scale a brand, a luxury personal goods or beauty brand. You can make it at scale and do it the right way because I don't think anyone has unless it's marketing shit. And so I'm really determined that we fly that flag. And when I said new ways, part of it was I feel like that industry, like the farming industry or the the environmental green sort of yeah that stuff gets so earnest and so like farmer joe and we we're not that you know we're we're fussy and we're we're design driven and so i think it just to make people think about the environment a different way i think we have

14:41Richard Christiansen:i love the you know the way that you've kind of included a feeling of hedonism and sensuality leaving it to pleasure instead of the sustainability or farming never talk about sustainability we never talk about it yeah yeah never the tip of the spear if you dug one level down and look at the efforts we go to with sourcing and that's yeah it's very it's very very complicated and it's very very very good but the second we talk about it people zone out yeah that's just selling pleasure well that was also a reaction to me leaving new york and working in a creative agency you know I left Chandelier just like absolutely exhausted and like drinking like a fish and totally over like overweight and out of alignment and I was so I was lonely and I didn't feel sexy and I was in that office until 11 o 'clock every night and seven days a week working for brands some brands I didn't particularly respect and I just was sort of uh you know in the back of my head like praying that one day someone would buy the agency or we would like what's the what's how do I pull the escape hatch I just couldn't figure it out and then but I really subconsciously wanted it so bad and and then to get out you so bad and I didn't know how because you know it's complicated business and it's making money and there's all these there's 100 people on payroll and like oh my god how do I and I was just uh sleepwalking through life and very very productively sleeping through life and um and then covid answered my my prayers you know covid just like destroyed all of our clients advertising and the company just crumbled and and i got my you know your deliverance i did it pushed me out and and so so coming back to los angeles being in my garden um just getting back in my body i wanted to feel sexy i wanted to have sexy and I wanted to eat well I wanted to like I wanted to like just uh I wanted to be in my garden with my dogs and my chickens and just like live and wake myself up and for me that meant like just good food and long baths and hot showers and listening to good music and so it was just really simple fundamental human needs I had and it was about pleasure and I I say those words a lot like pleasure is a human right and um you know I believe in radical pleasure because it's really You had to stand up for your own pleasure.

17:10And a lot of that is about, like, get off your screen and stop looking at your phone and smell things, eat things. And it sounds a little cheesy sometimes, but honestly, like, I needed to rescue myself. I was a shell. And so making these things, I say often to the team, like, the stuff we make is souvenirs of a happy life. I really, really, really, really wanted to create things that brought pleasure just to me, you know. Yeah.

17:36Richard Christiansen:Yeah. I think I mean I find it ironic I'm literally probably sitting uh so close to where the office is um in Soho yeah you know sleep just casually very well without me I'm very enjoyed actually yeah no but it's it's funny I think it's you've kind of tapped into you know whether it's the feeling of disconnection or social media or the world is crazy the lack of transparency and connections to nature i feel like you know so many people are feeling like they're sleepwalking a little through life no i feel like it's more than that now i feel like with trump and what's going on now also i feel like there's this rumbling of um a rumbling of an awakening of goodness in people people want goodness they want they want grace they want happy they want joy and in very complicated times and i think my job is to sort of ring my silent bell very loud like everyone come get it you know come come just enjoy some basic human pleasure and whether it's with my stuff or someone else's I don't care but we have to stand up for that and then you know it'll become a bit of a domino effect for everyone you know we have to um we have to we have to ring our silent bells if that makes sense and is like how do you think about i mean you don't talk do you talk about flamingo say as a lifestyle brand or it's a brand of radical pleasure or how do you what would you categorize kind of that i mean it depends where we are uh yes it's a let's say we're in wholesale speak yes it's a lifestyle brand for sure of course it is obviously and uh but the nice thing about it and really for me the continuing surprising thing about it is that i spent my whole life as many of you your friends have done making up stories for brands yes for creating brand books and creating these narratives and what's the purpose and who's the you know all this stuff and we were we were making things up and the beautiful thing about what my day-to-day thing is like there's just too many stories that are real we don't need to make anything you know there's the farmers there's the there's the there's the property there's the products there's the the the collaborations which have been so interesting the um this stuff this crazy adventure that has just been a real live you know uh bank that's been happening yeah and a real like a real i get so i get so annoyed with um you know brands that are not there's a difference between a brand and selling stuff and as you know and um and and having a real brand it's a very rare thing today to see a real brand and oh some truths with some truth and real like a real connection to a heritage and to an idea as opposed to just like a you know a group of people that sell things and i think most of the you know i could this is a whole other podcast but like this the the access to capital and the ability to copy and the ability to make things with contract manufacturers and to create you know businesses out of nothing it's easier than ever um and that that's sort of like a broken model vc model of uh let's build let's spend into it and what's your exit and all that stuff which doesn't interest me at all is um you know makes the it i think from a consumer's point of view it can get very confusing about what's real and what's not and i just i get very annoyed when uh when i see um you know when i see because I know people are doing things and makes me I know it's almost like you know the acts it just gets so easy that you know I feel like there's just so many kind of disposable brands that are never to last more than more than you know the trend cycle or you know won't last I mean I think what's interesting so you have taken investment we have uh and uh you mentioned your your board meeting i'm curious like how did you think about the investment uh kind of part and building your board like how how did you approach that because i'm assuming you needed a specific terribly actually in the beginning um i had never raised money yeah i'm not a money person and i was really i think quite bad at it i was very lucky in the beginning i had some friends who gave me very good advice they're like you know i always wanted to give that to someone else to worry about and they're like you know like people bet on you they're betting on you as a person you've got to sit there and you've got to be the one to make the ask and i so i was i think we had 162 presentations before anyone even sort of asked us for a second reading wow what was interesting and and also like consistently kept running out of money the business was um growing and the business just kept doubling and doubling and doubling every year.

22:35And we were just running out of money because we needed to buy, you know, we needed to buy, you know, ingredients. We needed to buy so many ingredients and hundreds of thousands of bottles and like hundreds of thousands of candle jars and that sort of stuff. And so we just kept running out of cash. I triple mortgaged my house. I borrowed money from everyone. We just did everything we could. We rented the house out for photo shoots, for parties.

23:03Richard Christiansen:Yeah, amazing. We'd go sleep in the goat shed for a night when people were in our home. We would do everything we could to get money. This is not that long ago. This is a few years back. And anyway, and a couple of things happened that, you know, I think, sorry, before I take it, I had the good stuff. I think the interesting thing about those meetings was, you know, a lot of finance bros were like. Margins. margins margins margins they're not wrong about margins but also the you know you're doing too many things are you a beauty brand are you a food brand are you what brand we don't understand it there's too much going on it's not clear um and i said no when none of those things were an ingredient brand at the end of the day um and then um everyone everyone said kill all the food stuff the margin on food is lower than beauty you know every like we need you to be insert name here glossier we need you to be by radio we need you to be large you know lalabo whatever the brand was like who can we copy and we were just steadfast that we're not copying anyone yeah and what's interesting now that like we've turned that cycle we're profitable we're well capitalized we're like the business is really solid it's interesting now that those people who were actually so aggressively critical in those years um we're like oh you know wow this is interesting you're a dimensional brand with food and beauty and I was like oh I didn't you the person that told me um yeah absolutely and so you know I'm I'm uh I was that uh period of years trying to raise money was uh harrowing and it was and it would keep me up at night and anyone who's done it I know they know how hard it is and how ill-prepared most of us are for it any advice um if possible I would say never take money from someone who didn't earn their own the best investors we've got are people who they themselves built their own businesses yeah and they have such empathy for the grind and they have such um clear and useful feedback for the tough times because they've done it themselves so that's why i get very wary and bored with sort of the dc institutional type um funds and uh all those people um oh we have a lot of good people on our board um the there's a oh my god goodness um people that have different corners there's a colleague of mine a very close friend of mine sid who's been with me from the start sid mather he's got a really sharp finance business mind um the the retailer i told you about in australia mecca um they have they have uh they have a presence on the board and they're just like retail geniuses yeah uh there's a representative from the luxury goods family that we all know that i can't say um in europe who um have a minority stake in the company now and that's actually the very interesting thing is that they sort of um they really they like us a lot i like them a lot they are a luxury brand conglomerate yeah And I like it that they're looking at us as a luxury brand.

26:14They're not looking at us as a almond brand, you know, or something like that. And so, and I think they're very clear that the, you know, let's put our hat on. And in 10 years time, you're running through an airport in wherever, and you need to buy a beautiful gift for someone. And maybe like, oh, it's a bottle of olive oil and a perfume and a soap and a cat. It's not weird that it's got multi-categories. And it's interesting that our number one products are always multi-category sets.

26:37Richard Christiansen:Yeah. Rather than. Yeah. What is your kind of top selling product? It changes season to season because everything's seasonal with us. But the tomato candle, the much copied tomato. Oh, my God. Like such a family multinational luxury company definitely has a tomato candle. Everyone has a tomato candle. but that one's still like still a winner and uh then there's peppermint soap that continues very well olive oil across the whole category um and we launched great sorry my husband always i think i'm ridiculous i actually bought a new square soap you know dish for oh we need to we need to make a soap dish for those you need a soap dish well i mean like what i mean like going into that luxury I think it's interesting because you're creating a different kind of luxury brand that really has the opportunity to go into so many categories.

27:46Richard Christiansen:You go into, you know, hospitality, presumably, like the world is endless that you're building. I mean, like, what are your thoughts on where you go? Is it airports? Is it airport retail or is it? Oh, for sure. I'd love to go into airports. I think that, well, there's a difference between like where we go category wise and where we go into how to reach us. I think we would obviously love to sell wherever, you know, wherever the market feels right. I think gifting is a big part of our business. So, of course, like port retail will be lovely. If you think about those other brands that we're sort of starting to work sort of on eye level with.

28:24Think about Byredo as a great example. Yeah. Or ASAP or Lala. But brands I also respect a lot. the you know think about their you know they're showing up beautifully in airports as well as in their own stores and as well as in different wholesale channels so the the way you find us i think will continue to grow and and already has but the what we do is interesting to me because i don't agree that we could go anywhere i i think um i think you look at some lessons and brands i loved learning about like uh smith and hawken was an iconic garden brand in america um i think the founders will tell you in their books that they you know from financial pressure from their investors actually started selling clothing in their stores because the margins were good but they intuitively knew that people that love plants don't normally love clothes and so that was a place they and that was sort of the start of the end of that brand in many ways and so I don't think we'll ever do apparel we'll never do anything like that we'd never go into those areas but I think if these and we'll never go into like functional health yeah functional beauty like we're not gonna promise you'll have less wrinkles i i'm excited to earn my wrinkles um but i think yeah next year we launch fragrance in a proper way yeah staying and um you know and obviously there's so much still so much room for yeah pleasure through food everything you smell and touch i have said i say and say again like my definition today of a happy life of a success actually is living with all my senses fully engaged of tasting as much as i can as as eating as much as i can smelling as much as i can just having my senses completely on fire is to me the definition of success so as long as we can deliver stuff that does that for me and for anyone i'll stand i think the right thing the definition

30:13Richard Christiansen:of being alive i think this i was wondering you know as i was going back to look at your guide to be coming alive um it was this is where the australia question comes in and it's a very stupid question probably but i was thinking about you know i love the idea of being alive of your ripening as you age oh ripening you got it's my favorite word yeah oh my god so good um i'm surprised i never saw the word fecund in your books um it's like but like you know there's just like yeah I think it's I this is gonna say I don't know what this says about me but I was just wondering if you think like I feel like I should be connecting with nature and like you know always think about that and try blah blah but I don't feel it and I think that's because I just grew up in the middle of London and it just it just isn't part of me and I'm wondering if how much of this kind of dream and this kind of is a return to like your childhood i know that sounds silly but like you grew up in the land you grew up connected to something without tv and phones and yeah no it's interesting my mind you know we grew up on a big farm in the middle of nowhere and um and i ran as fast as i could away from that you know i left home when i was six and i to London when I was 17 or something.

31:42And so couldn't wait to get away from the dirt under my fingernails. And now, of course, like coming really full circle and realizing what a way and a privilege that was. And I crave it now again more than ever. So I think so. I think it's absolutely a return to that. And also I think, as I said earlier, a push against years of working in an industry that I thought was increasingly sort of not real. And I think that the other thing, that book that you mentioned, the Guide to Becoming a Live book, I wrote that book really because I was worried we were a bit of, I had a bit of imposter syndrome.

32:22I was worried. We had just finished sort of financing stuff. I was worried that we were maybe a COVID success story, that maybe this was going to fall apart. That, you know, I just was, we built something so precious to me and I was so nervous that we'd lose it. And so I just wanted to ask my heroes, how do you stay happy? How do you keep it? People who had built worlds in some situations or definitely stood for something, how do you police it? And I think you'll find in that book, all those interviews, whether it's Martha Stewart or whether it was Jane Goodall or whether it was, I don't know, Jane Fonda or any of the people I spoke to there.

33:07I think the answer to that question in different ways for all of them was put your phone down. Just put your phone down, plant a tree, cook a meal, go give someone a hug. It came up in every interview, in every chapter they talk about living life through a small screen. And I think there's something very simple and very powerful with that, those lessons. And so, yeah, I'm very proud of that book. It was fun. I've just finished a new book, actually, which comes out in September. Three books, actually. We've just written three books. but the first one is in September and um it's a wild wild wild book um um about it's sort of that idea but I've taken it even further like how do we shake ourselves from um a mundane life I'm very and it's it's a really it's a great book it's it was uh I started to think about victory gardens do you know what a victory garden is yeah yeah in the war world war one first out of England yeah everyone's like grow your own food so that you can support the troops and we can send all the food there and then in world war ii the americans really ran with it is more of a sort of a uh not very authentic but sort of as a rally cry to get everyone around the war it's like the garden meets war propaganda yeah and um and like grow your own veggies and like save the troops and and uh well victory victory through through gardening and millions and millions and millions and millions of Americans grew vegetable gardens.

34:33And so, but I started to think like, if we had to do that today, what are we seeking victory from? Yeah. It's not Germany. It's not Japan. Is it AI? Is it our phones? Is it our tensions? Is it, is it climate? And yeah.

34:51Richard Christiansen:All I guess, what do we need victory from right now? What do I need victory from? And so really, this is a workbook for that. I'm very proud of it. it's a weird book we'll see how it does i love i mean it's interesting as both it's like you you've obviously you've got great connections you've interviewed these people you've talked about the hollywood thing you've got these books is that your marketing do you do any other marketing or it's mainly no we do a lot i mean obviously i love it's such a pleasure for me to be able to do you know i'm like a kid in a sandbox of all these fun tools at last you know so to be able to write all those books and to um i think that maybe the other way is like it for me like we are obsessed with i know it sounds cheesy but brand first like we're obsessed with it we were we we kind of avoid the finance people and the growth team and we never ask anyone their opinion we're just like we're filming all the time we're photographing all the time yeah yeah we're cooking things all the time we're really like uh that forward and so then you know where can we find a conduit for that storytelling.

35:58And it's interesting that the books do well, the Substack is doing very well, where it's just like long form stuff. But what's the most interesting thing about all the marketing, I will say, is that having done this for a long time, the one thing that's working is the thing that I would never have told anyone to do. I started writing a Friday letter, an email to our customers. Long form, not pretty. not really selling anything. It kind of was like, it kind of was the opposite of every best practice. But I just like, we wanted to talk about the people we're working with or who we're giving money to or whatever the thing was.

36:40And that one email, which still happens every Friday, it has like a 56 % open rate, which anyone that knows email marketing knows that like, you're lucky if you get like 0.1 % open rate. So I'm excited that I think we've built a really I don't know aware enthusiastic group of people who have supported us I'm very very grateful for their support very very grateful and then the other thing I do this is a joke in the office I call the top 50 customers every Sunday from that week and I ask them how they are and what they're doing that's amazing I've been doing it the whole time I do it every weekend drives my boyfriend Harvey absolutely nuts He knows he's going to lose me for the whole day.

37:27And I get into these long conversations. As soon as, first I text them. And then when people realize it's not, it's not like AR, you're like, oh, wow. And then we often all call.

37:37Richard Christiansen:It's the Richard Potts calling you. No, yeah. It's just, here's my son. Call you. And then we've had the craziest conversations. You know, we really like created a new product. That could be a book. It could be. I mean, I've been invited to weddings and funerals and christenings. And we've gone to people's houses for dinner. and so um that's been a really fun a fun thing you got these great stories some people who are like it's so interesting like uh um oh my god i've got so many stories it could be like someone who's who's saved up for six months to buy a peppermint soap at 40 or dollars or someone there was this one woman i called who bought a hundred soap a hundred of the same peppermint door stops i read about this yeah yeah it's my favorite story she bought 100 uses door stops because she lived in texas and everyone in texas has 100 doors um so it was like just like funny funny funny um wonderful like just you know good uh conversations you may have read i've written before um i was checking into a conference a long time ago not that long ago and and um i was at the reception desk of the hotel and there was an older man there next to me who was checking in obviously like the the ceo of a big company that was there i don't know which one and a gaggle of people fussing around him and you could tell like obviously like an important guy and then someone ran up to him and said oh i want you to meet sally sally's going to be doing all of our social media and sally's like 19 and um walks up to him and i i wanted to turn around and shake him really hard and say, like, why would you let the least experienced person in your company be in charge of the biggest doorway into what you're doing?

39:23Like, you're the boss. You should be doing it. You should be at the reins of that, which is why I am. I will always be at the end of that. And just, yeah, it makes no sense to me. Like, we've got to be close to what we do. We've got to be right there at eye level with everything we're doing.

39:38Richard Christiansen:Yeah. I'm curious about, like, you mentioned earlier you know keeping stuff small keeping um yourself small and you are very humble but you are also growing into this visionary founder like how do you think about that do you enjoy that do i enjoy the the attention of that yeah like do you enjoy being that kind of uh because because it is you know i it's interesting thinking you used to be like i'm sure you were always on like selling chandelier and like you you must have been good at that front being a front man do you still like and now you feel like a front man with a purpose and yeah i think i wasn't in the beginning i was very shy in the beginning and i think uh all those years of having to pitch at chandelier just to pay payroll made me good at it yes you know i became the quarterback in those pitches and all those meetings yeah um to a certain extent i don't mind it now i think uh when i was a kid i used to like Richard Branson was one of my heroes when I was a kid.