How Friendly Branding Set Graza Olive Oil Apart

0:00We had to be very confident in our perspective and not let best practices dictate how our site was going to be created because that's how we would just feel like everybody else. Welcome to Shopify Masters, your companion for starting and building a business. I'm Shweng Esther Shan. One of the biggest challenges for new food companies is standing out, especially on the grocery store shelf. Graza did this in a huge way. The company designed a unique squeeze bottle for its signature olive oil. It's perfect for chefs and home cooks who want to use just the right amount without dripping or getting the bottle greasy.

0:39The two-year-old company made such a big splash in the olive oil scene that it's been written up in Bon Appetit. And it's available at major retailers like Target and Whole Foods. Graza co-founder Andrew Benin is here today to share how the company differentiated itself from all of the others in a saturated market. Andrew, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me. We love Shopify. So awesome to hear and we love Graza. I feel like we've seen everyone on social media in person using Grazza, but the company only started two years ago. How did you come to this realization that you wanted to enter the olive oil market?

1:24It's the best realization ever, huh? I mean, olive oil has no enemies. It's the craziest thing. It's like everybody loves olive oil. We're friends with the avocados, tomatoes, bread. friends with the chefs and the gourmands. We were friends with the new up-and-coming cooks. Friends with the 60-year-old and 20-year-old is like the most transient category. I don't know. I felt just falling in love. Like you fall in love with people sometimes. That's happened in my life, thankfully. I fell in love with olive oil. I was living in Spain. My wife's from Spain. her family's from Spain and definitely had that kind of romanticized moment in southern Spain where I was like, ooh, something that I just tasted tastes different and it's used differently and just being observant and curious and hungry.

2:23Where were you tasting? Describe us that moment, that moment that you actually fell in love with olive oil. There was like a butcher shop close to where we were living and I was just buying every product that they were selling. Just it's not like a fancy store at all. And the way olive oil is positioned there is, you know, this is a local co-op, you know, 50 kilometers away is where we get our olive oil. And it was unfiltered and really murky and five euros for a three liter jug. and I was like this is great I'm definitely gonna buy this in the capitalistic way I flipped from the front of the label to the back of the label and found out who made it and then took a car there and said hey I really like your elbow can you teach me about this process can I buy some and can I can I do this I want to bring this to my friends my family I don't know it's kind of leapfrog from there.

3:26They made it clear that I was in the wrong place if I wanted to scale up an olive oil business. They were like, this is a tiny mountain town, which just so happens to be where Graza's name comes from. Graza Lema is the place where it was. And they pointed me in the direction of the real olive oil production provinces of Spain, where everyone works in olive oil and everything is olive oil and everyone's proud of olive oil and it's olive oil, olive oil, olive oil. It was just crazy. I mean, for most people, when they taste something great on a trip, they might have just enjoyed that meal and that's the end of the story.

4:09And even when you were meeting these producers, they were also telling you that this is something hard to do. And especially for olive oil, it's a saturated market. It's hard for the typical consumer to actually differentiate, but you still went ahead with the idea anyways. Yeah. I think it's something saturated that generally means that there is an opportunity and it might be a high barrier to entry, which is almost better than a low barrier to entry and something that's unsaturated, right? Like olive oil is not swimming upstream. It's not redefining what's good for you and what's bad for you.

4:50A lot of these definitions have been put in place, you know, for in our category, thousands of years, you know, the Mediterranean diet for 90 years in this country, like there's a lot of upward trends that have less sex appeal to them because they're not necessarily media bull. And they're not, you know, a reinvention of, say an oreo right it's like it's an oreo but i'm gonna make it with chicory root fiber and stevia and monk fruit and like now i've remade the like that's not what this is this is in every single pantry it has massive household penetration there was no brand affinity for sure that was the opportunity to say well there's a different way of doing this a different way of positioning something that everyone already knows about, different quality to access at scale that a certain price point makes accessible.

5:49It sounds like you literally said, let's create a brand that people can have affinity towards in olive oil. Some background on your career. You have a resume that anyone in direct to consumer would be envious of, some really great brands, Casper to Magic Spoon. When you were in those companies, did you have an inkling that you wanted to start something of your own? Yeah, even before that, I graduated college early and found a job on Craigslist to work at Warby Parker, believe it or not. I was always jealous of artists when I was studying business in college because I felt, artists and engineers, because I felt like they had found something that could capture their creativity and their self-expression and get it out into the world.

6:38Whether or not it works or not, they found a way to channel that. I think for me, working at these D2C startups and in the consumer space, there were a lot of elements that I wanted to leverage to express myself. Like, how do you communicate with someone you don't know and build trust, right? Like that is in the consumer space, You use branding, you use copy, you use messaging, you use people that can validate your products. Like this was my version of art and doing it for other people. Well, it's awesome and definitely helps you climb the DTC venture capital temple. You're always handcuffed by not doing it on your own.

7:23And that was a frustration that I felt and definitely a frustration that my co-founder Alan felt in his career. And breaking through that is hard because I think you can read 200 self-help books and business-oriented self-help books instead of starting a company because you're just you're scared. It is a scary thing to take that leap. But I like when you mentioned how everything was like pieces of a puzzle when you wanted to start Graza. Another piece in your career that made sense was also your experience in kitchens, which kind of exposes you to the squeeze bottle in a way, which makes Graza so iconic today.

8:08So talk to us about that part of your career. I think a lot of people have a food evolution. I think there's certain things that people get passionate about. there is like, I fell in love with the farmer's market. And you're like, you become a farmer's market person. I worked at the farmer's market selling, you know, local grass fed beef from upstate New York. That was a great chapter.

8:36I would take the train up to Stone Barns at Blue Hill and volunteer and learn from, you know, some of the best seed programs in the Northeast, like curiosity curiosity but then on the cooking side i went to a food security conference you know just on eventbrite.com just looking at events in new york just trying to get deeper into the scene and mike anthony is a chef at gramercy tavern he's also on the board of god's love we deliver which is a big food security organization here in new york and approached him after the conference and said, hey, I'm incredibly moved by your perspective on food security.

9:16Would love to work for you. And he's like, yeah, be at the restaurant next week. That's how that chapter started. It came full circle because after finding a lot of these beautiful oils, I brought them to Mike and I said, hey, I don't think cooking is in my future, but I have something that I want to show you. and we tried them and he actually really helped with positioning Graza and said, do not start another gourmet food brand. That is the last thing that we need. And that is the path to pure douchebaggery in his eyes. What you just told me, find a way to tell everybody that and make this product available to as many people as you can.

10:01It's like if we get people to eat a lot of olive oil or switch to olive oil, we're not going to get everyone to live to 100 like some companies would promise. This isn't the blue zones. We're going to increase life expectancy maybe by two days on a macro scale. And that's a victory. Two days are worth a lot. So it's just find ways to get as many people to experience it because it is objectively healthier. A lot of people think it's delicious, like lean into that. The accessibility part is so important, right? Just because to your point, it's cool to hear that it was inspired through events about food security.

10:43We're talking about entrepreneurship and starting a business, but I also love how you peppered in these points in your career where it was Craigslist and Inventbrite that kind of sparked these like really long paths that only make sense when you look back. I spoke in a panel in New York and there were some other founders on the panel, someone from Andy Swim, which is a huge e-commerce company, and someone from Red Antler, the originals of D2C branding. And it felt really weird looking out at the crowd and recognizing that I was there three years ago on the other side. All this effort. If you want to do this, it's going to take effort.

11:23good things in life are hard and seeing that it was all worth it in the end. Well, time will tell, right? But up until this point, it was worth it. And I think people that dream of being entrepreneurs, that scrappiness, that hustle pays off. It might not, which sucks because not everyone figures out a way to put the pieces together. Not everyone has the same resources, but if you want to do it, it's definitely part of it. So you have this experience tasting different olive oils in Spain. I'm sure you were inundated with so many different varieties and types. How do you then select just the two types of oils for Graza?

12:06Sizzle and drizzle. They kind of sell themselves.

12:13olive oil in north america has always been positioned as something that you shouldn't cook with right because there's the whole smoke point battle which we think is a crock of shit people are using olive oil in neapolitan pizza ovens that are a thousand degrees in naples and over here we're like oh smoke point like can't use it if it's over 400 degrees i'm like are you guys hearing yourselves this product's been around forever and the other way that it's been positioned through consumer research is there was bitterness and astringency and spiciness to good olive oil that for a long time the american consumer was believed to be averse to saying you We like butter.

13:01We're a butter country. We're a neutral cooking fats country. And if you're starting an olive oil company and you're getting consumer insights or leveraging that stuff or hiring someone to help you on that side, they're going to say the same thing. Our positioning was we're going to sell what we like. You're going to sell something that we believe in. Not what we're being told the consumer is asking for because we don't know that. We don't actually, we haven't spoken any consumers. So the varietal that we use, Piqual, is a really special one. It is widely consumed in Spain. A lot of companies that we compete with will buy it to mix it in with other olive oil varietals to add some flavor.

13:49but using it exclusively has been a no-no because of how intense it is in olive oil. Intensity is usually correlated to antioxidant load and polyphenol load, which are the things you want from olive oil, right? We just felt like there was a lot of disingenuous behavior of, well, it's olive oil, it must be good. Like, not necessarily true. Like it's olive oil, Maybe you're a brand that figured out to charge a premium for it because of how it's perceived. But the benefits are actually coming from specific varietals, specific harvest times, specific practices that we wanted to bring to the market at scale.

14:35One way would be to ring an alarm and say, there's a lot of really shady activities out there. And we felt like fear-mongering marketing could work to a certain degree, but not at scale. So we took the opposite approach. We're like, sizzle for cooking, drizzle for finishing, really fun brand. Let us convince you with joy and humor and clear information rather than fear-mongering. We can make a whole documentary about the olive oil industry. There's so much history, nuanced context. But even if I didn't care about any of that, the words sizzle and drizzle can easily tell me what Graza's products are all about.

15:21What's your advice for conveying your whole brand story so easily with so few words? Oh, man, that's tough. I mean, we worked with a really good branding agency. If you have the idea, but you don't have someone that can extract it, you have a missing piece in your brand creation process. So maybe you are starting the company with someone who has that expertise or maybe is a creative director or works at a branding agency or just does that or a copywriter. For us, it was, you know, leaning heavily on our branding agency to pull everything out. and help us put it back together. I mean, sizzle and drizzle didn't come from a branding exercise, though.

16:09Sizzle and drizzle comes from aha moments, which I think you have to kind of be patient for. Squeeze bottle didn't even come from years working in a restaurant. That was part of the aha moment, but it actually happened in the shower, you know, using a Dr. Bronner's soap and being like, oh my god this is it this brand's got it going on i love them but get out of the shower rinse it out fill it up with olive oil and put it in a pan and bah like sizzle and drizzle was kind of the same so i think you have to be patient you know we had a different name for a long time it took us three months to switch our name who knows what the success of the company could look like if Braza wasn't the name and no one really knew what it meant.

17:00And it's also kind of cool. And you have to have patients and partners that pull all the information that you've built up for a long time out of you and then pare it down for you. And yeah, a lot of work. Very cool to hear the behind the scenes moments, those aha moments that really help the business. I'm chatting with Andrew Bennett, co-founder and CEO of Graza. Like to take a moment here and thank all of the listeners for tuning in. Please take a moment to subscribe to Shopify Masters for more conversations from founders and experts and also leave us a review or comments for the show. Thank you so much.

17:44myself and many others have seen our favorite food creators and social media creators use graza and i would just love to hear how you guys tackle that side of the business working with influencers i mean a lot of that is i think from the upfront work and how the brand is positioned it feels friendly so even if you don't know the people behind it there's a friendliness being emoted another thing is it's olive oil there's less friction in in people just using it because it's something that they need it's something that they buy it's something that they enjoy that combined with a new form factor tactile experience something that can make you laugh definitely set fire to it i really think that if you're gonna bet on creator seating as the only thing that's going to lead to your success, like you'll be left in the dust because these people are getting hundreds of boxes, hundreds of DMs every single day from the next brand.

18:50The amount of brands that are starting are insane. So it's the first product market fit, plus the packaging, plus the brand, plus what it is, you know, it all has to kind of line up. To that point, I think if you had the product that people want to repurchase and reuse, you're kind of having this seeding effect for a lifetime, right? If someone genuinely likes Graza and they use it in every single cooking video, the impact is exponential. Power of just the cap, you know, sometimes you don't need to see the whole bottle. these micro moments in the creator economy and in content creation are what count these these habitual moments that you see a green cap there you see a green cap there you know we didn't engineer it to be that way we didn't think that that would happen um we're reaping the benefits of it of course i think it's hard to replicate because there's so much behind that green cap in that bottle, the investments that we're making in the content that we produce, the investments we're making in the way our team is structured and where we're kind of indexing on talent to make sure we are genuine and cool and progressive and creative.

20:14That with, you know, having a big retail presence, it's like, man, it's all of it. We sound so smart when we talk on a podcast. It's like a lot of luck also, you know? I mean, yeah, like I think anyone would have told you not to start an olive oil company. They did. Everyone, everyone did say do not do this. Like this is insane. All the way from family to friends to investors. It was a big, big no. Like this is not going to work. How did you go through the process of building the site to actually make people want to buy olive oil online? Yeah, it takes some risks. We obviously had UX and UI expertise as part of our web dev process.

21:01Shout out to Sam Faulkner, wherever you are. But we had to be very confident in our perspective and not let best practices, you know, dictate how our site was going to be created, because that's how we would just feel like everybody else. If something's working in the marketplace, that means that everyone's doing it. The end result is homogeny and everything feels the same. So we did a lot of no-nos when we created our site, like a 24-megabyte video on our homepage that is just slowing it down. You know, our load times can be slow. Well, this is how we're going to get our kind of visual perspective across in a really nice way.

21:48You know, CTA that's really hard to see and maybe won't click on. Well, people that do click on it probably have high intention of purchase. So is that correlated to higher conversion rate? Who knows? We don't do any heat mapping on our site just yet to understand what people are doing. but we probably will conversion rate eventually dwindles from 10 to eight to five and you're like oh five is still great but what can i do to get it back to eight yeah i think commerce online like i said it's starting to all feel the same and standing out is more difficult more expensive and full of risk and we believed in all of that you know we took a more expensive route to our site development to a custom build.

22:34We took a more expensive route to brand, to production and photo and video development. We took a more risky approach to e-commerce best practices, and it worked out for us. Were there any apps, tools that you've really enjoyed, or were there moments during the development that pivoted the direction of how things were built? Going into it, there wasn't that kind of engineering to it. This was much more, we're going to design our website based on the story that we want to tell. So that's how we're going to wireframe it. Homepage, what's the story we want to tell? PDPs, what's the story we want to tell?

23:14About us, what's the story we want to tell? Every single page was designed separately based on what the storytelling goal was, not what the pages end goal was. It wasn't reverse engineered from conversion. It was engineered from the story. So we chatted a lot about the successes, all the things that went right with Graza. But like any other business, things can go wrong. Tell us about last holiday season and what you learned from it. This one's funny because in our early pitch decks, we had pitched, you know, Graza's not for gifting. Graza's for everyday use. And then I think Q4 brought us to our senses.

24:02We're like, holy moly, people are really gifting this product like crazy. And that's amazing for us. And our order volumes were a lot higher than we had anticipated. It's really hard to scale up a warehouse in the moment during the most difficult and volume-driven time of the year. From production and everything, we were really pressure tested and some gaskets broke for sure. So we had a variety of issues that we were getting data on through our customer service channels. And just from seeing our products out in the world, flaking labels, our embossing was peeling off. Some of our bottles were dented.

24:48People were waiting three weeks to get their products. And it got to the point where we couldn't quantify how big of an issue it was. there were issues and just had an idea to email at that point, you know, all 70, 80 ,000 of our customers at the same time to say sorry. And it's been reported on now, we eventually got coverage in the Wall Street Journal because one of our customers that got the email was a writer at the Wall Street Journal is the most organic earned media that's possible. Like a journalist gets your ridiculous email and then wants to write about it. But that was similar where there was a lot of no's, like, do not do this.

25:28Our PR team was like, do not bring attention to something that might not be that big of an issue. You know, there's no need to do that. People love Graza. Why are you going to inject any sense of negativity? But it felt like the right thing to do. And the responses were magnificent. a lot of people think they understand definitely that small business community it's like you're you're going through it we went through it we started a landscaping company or we started a bakery which like it's an aside but we hate the word startup at grasa so much like we just feel like we're a small business and i think startup is way too glorified like if you if you are starting a landscaping company like that is a startup as much as it is a small business, same way it works.

26:19So anyway, long way of saying being honest worked. It's funny listening to your stories because I oftentimes relate to your PR team more because I understand like sometimes you don't want to draw attention to that. I relate more to the people who told you not to run an olive oil company or the investors that were against you just launching with two SKUs. But I think there's a theme in our episode where you always knew what you wanted to do. And I think following your intuition has really paid off. And I'm glad that you actually wrote that letter and was honest about what was happening. What do you have to say about betting on this decision?

27:04And also, what's the future for product expansion? I mean, I think the people that bet on it are probably really proud. I know I am. There was white space. You just had to believe in it. And you had to believe in the people behind it. But in our category, generally, it was pretty easy to see that on one side, things were really luxurious. and on the other side things were really paired back and private label and no investment in product quality or brand just like i don't even want to call it value because the product is so inferior we found a way to cut right through the middle and that is white space like there is a price point in between there is a brand positioning that is different there is a quality that is high and that scale that isn't fluffed up in olive oils.

28:00Like, what are you paying for? The bottle that it's in or the oil that's inside? You know, it would be like putting Kerrygold butter in a 24-carat gold cube and then saying, this is grass-fed butter from Ireland for$50 instead of grass-fed butter from Ireland for$4. That's what this was like. So I don't know, some people saw it, felt good about taking that bet. And obviously in venture capital land, people want to make a return on that. And I think they will. And then product expansion. Yeah, there's a lot of pressure to expand products. Things work really well when you're all focused on the same thing.

28:48so product expansion is a fine line between creep on the business and taking advantage of demand and opportunities when provided to you and something we deliberate and struggle with quite a bit but i think graza is more than a olive oil company even though it's worked really well because it's an olive oil company who knows when when those things will hit the market or if they will. But if someone listening to this has an idea, you know, just shoot me a note. Well, you never know if you landed at Warby Parker through Craigslist, someone might land at Graza through listening to this episode. Thank you so much for joining us, Andrew.

29:26Yeah, thank you so much for having us. Hopefully this was helpful. That's Andrew Benin, the CEO and co-founder of Graza. Shopify Masters is produced by Gogo Zoger and Megan Coyle. Our engineers are Miku Betlam and Matt Schwartz. Benjamin Gottlieb is our multimedia lead and I'm Shuang Esther Shan. We'll catch you next time on Shopify Masters.