How to Make Retailers Chase Your Brand

0:00I used to think being a pearl snowboarder was going to be the pinnacle of my life. This came along and I just wanted something that I can work on now and continue to work on for the rest of my life.

0:14You never forget the way someone smells, especially if they're wearing one of Salt & Stone's products. Inspired by scents from nature and the sea, Nima Jalali has designed a brand like truly no other. I started to care more about what I put on my body. I was looking for something that resonated with me and I couldn't find it, so I set out to create it. After eight years in business, now six deodorants are sold every single minute. And this year, the brand is on track to bring north of$100 million in annual revenue. We're also the best-selling deodorant in Sephora. So how did Salt & Stone perfect product development after five versions of their iconic deodorant?

0:48Nima's here today to crack open industry secrets and share growth hacks any founder can use. We try to operate our organization like a sports team. We want the best players on the team, but we all have to work together. I'm your host, Serena Smith, and this is Shopify Masters, your companion for starting and building a business. Thank you for being here. Thank you for having me. Okay, so I gotta tell you, like, I gotta fangirl out for a moment because I started wearing salt and stone deodorant, I'm proud to say, like five years ago, which maybe at least semi puts me in the early adopter category.

1:16And I think to me, even now, it still feels, and part of its appeal to me, frankly, is that it still feels kind of like an if you know, you know, sort of boutique-y brand. But given the numbers I just stated, it's clearly not that anymore. I mean, your growth has skyrocketed. Have you felt like you've been able to sort of retain that small company premium feel? As far as feel internally, yes. For me, that's important is just to make sure we're operating like a startup, even if we're technically beyond the startup phase. So internally, I keep telling the team, operate like a startup and let's be scrappy, let's be gritty.

1:54Um, let's move quick. But I think overall, we don't want to appear small from the customer perspective, right? We've always wanted to appear big, even when it was just a one, one man show running the thing out of my studio apartment. My goal was always for everything to feel big. So I'm glad that it's caught up to us and we're now a larger brand. I mean, from a product design perspective or from a brand positioning perspective or a content strategy perspective, how do you create that feeling of a brand feeling big, especially in moment when it isn't yet? Certainly you can take inspiration from other sort of legacy heritage brands that have been here and will be here for the next hundred years.

2:34You can take some inspiration from that rather than take inspiration from maybe a new trendy brand that's having a moment because they're celeb led or influencer led. And you never know that may last 10, 20 years or whatever, but I've just always been so inspired by these brands that are going to be here for the next hundred plus years, that just leads to all the decisions on packaging, branding, naming it. Every decision we make really is keeping that in mind that, you know, we really want to build this brand and we are building this brand to be a legacy brand that will be here for the long run.

3:08So. And was that the vision from Jump to build a legacy brand? Yes. I used to be a pro snowboarder. And part of why I wanted to start a brand is your snowboard career only has a certain expiration on it, right? And you get older and your career starts to kind of go downhill a little bit, right? And with building a brand, it doesn't come and go with your athleticism or anything like that, right? And so I just wanted something that I can work on now and continue to work on for the rest of my life. And so that was the plan with this brand. As legend has it, you were a pro snowboarder before this.

3:40It's part of the lore of Salt and Stone. But why did you make the transition into personal care products when you did? Yeah. So I had a knee injury. I tore my ACL and I wanted to heal as fast as possible. I wanted to just get right back out there. So I started getting into health and wellness. I started actually going to Erewhon back when it was just like a one location, like health food market. And, you know, I started to really care about what I was putting in my body and just try to heal as fast as possible. And then with that, I started to care more about what I put on my body. Right. And so I started looking at these ingredients and the deodorant I was using and those kind of products.

4:20So I was looking for something that resonated with me that checked all the boxes and I couldn't find it. So I set out to create it. And in starting that, when you tell your friends and people you're going to start a deodorant brand, you get a lot of like, don't go into beauty. It's really saturated. But I saw an opportunity to do something different and something that's done differently than what was historically done. And what did you think was missing at the time? From a product perspective, a non-toxic deodorant that actually performs can keep up with my lifestyle. One that truly works. One that's actually like a pleasure to use that wasn't sticky or gritty, you know, that glided on just as smooth as the drugstore deodorants.

5:04And, you know, design is obviously a huge part of everything we do. So I wanted it to be something that, you know, you don't want to tuck away in your drawer. you want it to be able to live next to your Aesop hand wash, right? Something that's just truly beautiful and you want to show off on your countertop. And then you tie it all in with a great fragrance experience that's a little bit more elevated, whereas traditionally deodorants were like peppermint and sage. And just this is more, I guess, taking more of a fine fragrance approach to it, you know, elevated scents that I actually wanted to wear.

5:32It's true. It did feel like, it feels like the olden days now. It was just a few years ago, but it felt like for a really long time, like if you wanted something that was clean, you were going to have to sacrifice on aesthetics or on scent. There wasn't anything at the time that was really satisfying all of those buckets at once. You're right. It seemed like, you know, all the cleaner skincare and body care brands had sort of like hippie sort of packaging and that kind of vibe. And it's like, why does it have to have, why does it have to be like that? You know, I mean, you look at Erewhon too, you know, like their evolution sort of kind of like went with that too.

6:07Now, you know, celebs and, you know, you don't have to be a hippie to shop there anymore. You definitely don't have to be a hippie to shop there. And you have to have something more than a hippie's bank account to shop there. That's for sure. My home away from home. Okay. So you're a professional snowboarder prior to this. I want you to talk through the skill sets that really served you moving into business from being in professional sports, but also like the tougher parts of the learning curve, transitioning from this high octane field to then the sort of more slower plotting along of building a business over the long term.

6:45I think it all comes down to discipline and work ethic. With snowboarding, it's not a team sport, right? You're only going to be as good as how much work you put into it. And you would find yourself in these situations where you're filming for a movie and you're on the spot and you have to go and be ready and do whatever trick. And if you're ready, it makes it that much easier, right? And you're that much better. And so I quickly learned the more you put into it, the more time you put into it, the better the outcome is, right? For your career. And the same thing goes with building the brand. I just wanted something that I could really work on for the rest of my life and something that won't go with my athleticism.

7:24And so I've always wanted to start a brand. I knew it. It was just the matter of when. And the ACL injury really was perfect timing for that. Strange blessings that come in unexpected packages. I think that there's something to be said, like you were talking about the work ethic component. And I think that's so fascinating. It makes sense, right? That as a pro athlete, you're so committed. Your dedication is everything, but there are also limits, right? You can only go until the body breaks, you know, but with a business, you can kind of like work around the clock if you want to. Was that the case for you in the early years?

7:56Is that the case for you now? Where do you find balance? It was the case for me in the early years. I'm not going to lie. It never felt like work because I truly love building the brand, but there were really no limits in the first five years, I'll say, to the point where even when I would sit down and watch a movie with my wife, I wasn't really watching the movie. I was just thinking about the business. And so from the moment I woke up to the moment I went to bed, it was all, it was all work and it just consumed me, you know, but it was so exciting and I wouldn't have wanted to have it any other way.

8:32Do I work like that now? No. And I probably won't work like that again, unfortunately, but I have boundaries now. I still work really, really hard, but you know, now we have kids. And so first thing I do when I wake up is spend time with my kids. I make sure I carve out time every single day for them. Dinner's uninterrupted, not working. I'm not trying to reply to an email and then take another bite, things like that. So I've, yeah. And I think now, you know, I always knew that if I put in the work, we could get to a point where I could hire a world-class team and I wouldn't have to work as much.

9:04And now, so I still work a lot, but it's, it's a lot more methodically. And it's, I work a lot, a lot smarter now. And I feel so grateful that I'm able to. Do you have any practical tips around what working smarter looks like? Picking and choosing your battles, hiring somebody who's better at ad strategy than myself. So I'm not in there hiring a better designer than myself. Somebody who can go in and do the design instead of me trying to go in and do every little thing, because you can create endless amounts of work if you want to just do everything by yourself. And that's how I had to operate at the beginning.

9:36I know people say it all the time, but hiring people who are better than you at every little thing, and that will really move the needle and it'll make it so you don't have to work around the clock. When you started to move out of the zone of having to wear all the hats into the space where you had a little bit of breathing room and were able to bring on a team. For you on a personal level, when you are so used to holding something so closely as your baby, what was that process like of being able to like loosen the reins? Tough. Yeah. And it's still tough for the first five years was doing all the copy, all the image selections, all the photo shoots, like every little piece of it.

10:17So you bring on a team and at first, of course, there's a learning curve, right? Like learning the brand. And so it was tough to just let go and put trust and work with the team on getting up to speed on brand tone of voice and how we do things and how we want to come across. But I have gotten a lot better at letting go and just making sure that we bring on people that I truly feel like are the best of the best in everything so I can just sit back and put my trust. It's interesting. There's like sort of this like parallel path going on in your life. It feels like with the growing of your own family personally, and also the growing of the brand family and being able to like kind of stand as the patriarch, you know, and not have to necessarily have your hands in absolutely everything anymore.

11:01It's a different chapter. I'll say the first chapter of it being so hands in everything was some of the funnest times of my life. Like it was so thrilling. Every little win, You know, it felt like we were getting a win every day and it was just like five of us. But now we're just in like a in a different phase. That's just as much fun, but in a different way. Now it's like more higher level strategy and getting out of the weeds. So it's it's it's a lot of fun, but just in a different way. Do you think that that kind of all in potentially round the clock commitment is kind of a necessity of any founder who wants to make their brand work?

11:41I'm sure there are exceptions, but I think for the most part, yes, I think you have to be all in and you have to go very hard and pretty much nonstop. If you're a one man show, we didn't start with an investment. We started with money out of my pocket. Right. And so, you know, just like I was telling you with snowboarding, what you put in is what you get out. Like I knew that from the start. So I was just committed to making it work. So I think founders coming in, if you want to bootstrap it and you want to do it yourself, you pretty much have to learn how to do everything, right? So I don't think there's a way around it for the most part.

12:17I think, of course, there's some exceptions. We take it for granted now because Salt-N-Stone's products have been out for so long, but it's like we were talking about a little bit earlier, like cracking the nut on a clean deodorant that really works and also smells great. Nothing had existed like that really prior. Can you take us inside that initial product development process and the iterating to get to the formulation that ended up hitting the market? Yeah. Hundreds of samples, many, many rounds, obsessing, learning about each ingredient, where to source each ingredient from, what each ingredient does, and just really becoming an expert in deodorant and in formulation and just trying to learn as much as I can.

13:03And then having a small panel that you could trust. They're the most highly critical people that you know will tell it to straight, right? So you know you love it, but you might not find an imperfection that they might find, right? So it's just really rounds and rounds and rounds of development and obsessing over it until you get to a spot of perfection and you're like, I can't keep this in my pocket anymore. Let's go. Who were those people for you who you knew wouldn't yes man you? Yeah, I mean, close friends. My wife, I lean on a lot. She comes from skincare. I don't come from skincare or beauty.

13:36There's a girl named Delfina that I've worked really closely with. She's sort of my go-to brand whisperer that I can lean on a lot. We have a small, a small trusted crew that I go to. How long was that initial development and iteration process before you were able to bring that deodorant to market? And you had a sunscreen stick at the time too, right? Sunscreen product? Yes. Yeah. Yes. So there was, and then that got phased out. It was sort of, I think the world further confirming that we, that, you know, we're a body care brand. We're not a sun care brand. You know, we kind of wanted to like dabble in that, try to see how that went.

14:11But once, you know, we did deodorants in different fragrances and really focused on those scents, it really started taking off for us. Yeah, we launched and we've done about five generations to the point of now it's perfection and we'll never change the formula again because I truly believe it's the best. Really? Not natural deodorant, but the best deodorant out on the market. I truly believe that. So yeah, it took a lot of rounds of development and five generations in. And fragrance development can take a long time though. If we get a fragrance oil that we really love, sometimes it's tough to get it to come out in the base of the deodorant exactly how we want it to.

14:43So sometimes that could take months or years even. It's a granular question, but I'm interested to know how much shift there's been from Gen 1 salt and stone deodorant to now Gen 5. Yeah. What are the key differences that have happened over time? Smoother application, longer lasting, even cleaner ingredients, mainly those things. I mean, and then the stick has sort of evolved. Even the design of the stick has evolved over time as well. There's a science to this and there's very much an art to it also. It's a nuanced thing to try to answer, but it's like you're on the fifth generation, which means that Gen 1 wasn't the most perfect iteration.

15:24You feel like you've landed on it now. How, if you're in the CPG world and you're developing something of your own, how do you know when something is like ready enough? It's just something that you have to, you know, trust your panel around you and trust yourself, right? Our first generation deodorant, like some may not even be able to tell the difference between the fifth, right? Really? It's just us really, really, really picking it apart. So I think deep down, when you know you have something that's truly better than anything on the market, that's the time to go, right? You can make little adjustments as you go and change small things like fragrance notes and things like that.

16:00But I think once you feel like you got something that you're truly confident to put out there, then it's just time to go for it. We're talking about a brand that is founded by a former pro snowboarder, but you don't really broadcast that. this is a product line that is clean, hugely important for some consumers, but that's also not like the above the marquee information either. I'm interested to know from a brand positioning standpoint, how you've decided what you wanted to focus on and also why you've decided to lean away from the messaging that you very much could have leaned into. As far as playing into your first number?

16:41Yeah. And even the clean component of it, right? I don't believe in making a celebrity out of a non-celebrity. You know, I'm not a celebrity. You know, I was a pro snowboarder. But again, I want to create a brand that's a legacy brand and that's not going to come and go by one person. Right. And so I think there's truly interesting marketing stories to be told and a story to be told about a brand, about the brand, rather than just playing into my personal story. So it never really was part of our strategy to like put me in the front and talk about me like I'm some kind of celebrity. It's interesting.

17:13Like I was pouring over the Salt-N-Stone website and it was incredibly hard to find the page on the website that talked about you. Yeah. It's hidden. If you're going to buy an iPhone, not that I'm comparing us to Apple, but if you're going to buy an iPhone, you know, it's like you don't want to read like a Steve Jobs bio, right? You just want to know about the phone and what makes it special and the marketing behind it and the features behind it. So that's sort of the way I think. Fair. It is still something of a rarity to see a man in the personal care space. How was that experience for you? Did you feel like it worked to your advantage?

17:51Was there opposition that you came up against? Yeah, didn't come across any opposition. Not something I thought about at all. I don't come from beauty personally, and I didn't set out to start a beauty brand. I just wanted to start a brand. But of course, it becomes obvious when you're in a Sephora meeting and I'm the only guy in the meeting. But it's great. You said your wife came from skincare? She worked for Aesop. She worked for True Botanicals. She's an esthetician. So she knows a lot about skin, a lot about ingredients, a lot about what makes a formula good and what makes a formula bad. That's a secret weapon.

18:25She was my secret weapon. And we were sniffing each other's underarms all the time as we were developing the deodorant. Yeah, I mean, it smells so good. And there is something about like really nailing that unisex space. My husband and I share the same salt and stone deodorant. Smells great on both of us, you know? I love that. You really nailed it. You talked about having the vision from Jump of building a legacy brand. You're now going to be surpassing$100 million in revenue. We're on the journey to being among the Nikes of the world. Do you feel like Salt-N-Stone is right now? I feel like we're just getting started.

19:06We're definitely making some moves and making some noise, and we're on our way. But we are just getting started in our story, and there's a long way to go. But I certainly like the path that we're on. What does that mean? It means that to get to that level, there's a lot more work and there's a lot more brand recognition. There's a lot more things we have to do, right, to get in that conversation. We have a collaboration coming out tomorrow with Aritzia. Things like that, you continue to get eyeballs on the brand and turn us more and more into a household name. But of course, you know, I'm not going to downplay Nike.

19:38You know, they're one of my favorite brands and it's going to be, it'll take a while for us to get to that level, but I'm confident we can. Are there other brands or companies that you look to as your inspiration? I'd say Nike is one of my biggest inspirations. They cater to all kinds of different consumers. My friends who are designers love them. You know, my friends who don't care about design love them. They just execute flawlessly on digital, whether it's an email or a marketing campaign, an ad, whatever it is. They operate to excellence. So they're one I look at a lot. You're sold on Amazon.

20:13You're sold in Sephora. You're sold in Erewhon. And to let people outside of LA into sort of the lore and mythical nature of Erewhon, it's like you were saying. It's a grocer, but it's like a very, it's a very clean, high-end grocer that also sells beauty products and personal care and whatever. It's so interesting that Salt and Stone can exist at the intersection where it can be appealing to what seems like pretty diverse and kind of disparate consumer groups. Like I'm one of those people who shops on Amazon and Sephora and at Erwan, but like it almost feels like different parts of my identity coming forth.

20:51Like how have you managed from a brand perspective to stay in the space where you can be working in all those spaces and they're not mutually exclusive? That is a very interesting and magical part about the brand that if you look at Nike, they're able to be distributed in different stores in different types of places, you know, and luckily we are similar. You know, we're the best-selling deodorant on Amazon. We're also the best-selling deodorant in Sephora. And when you look at our post-purchase survey and, you know, you'll see consumers are trading up from mass brands. They're trading up from your drugstore brand.

21:26And if you look at the top 20 best-selling deodorants on Amazon, nothing is even close to$20, which is how much our stick is. So it's telling you that the consumer is willing to spend more for a better product. And we're able to pull in a mass consumer as well as a prestige consumer. Was the pitch process, if there was a pitch process with Sephora versus Air One, let's say, did they feel distinct in the ways that landing those accounts came to be? We actually have never done outreach to a retailer. So everything has came to us. And I think that's just a result of showing up big and showing up strong.

22:05The whole thought was, let's become a brand that Sephora has to have, right? And then they'll come to us. So that was the mission. And that's what we're going to continue to do. And that'll only help our sell through in there. But instead of, you know, starting the brand and going and knocking on doors and trying to get in, you know, we focused on showing up really strong digitally and having the strongest website. you know, the strongest ads and a strong brand story and great product and having it all be a 360 excellent experience. And then, you know, Sephora came to us. Can you spin that into some advice for our viewers?

22:42We've got a lot of early stage aspiring founders for those who are looking to the future of trying to land their retail clients. What I would just say to focus on the brand, focus on digital, and just really try to do digital excellently. Focus on email, ads, website, make sure it's all best in class. Create a brand that these retailers need to have, something that's different than everything else on the market. And if the retailers feel like they need to have it, they'll come to you. That's my advice rather than going to knock on their doors too early because if it's a no, it's tough to go back to them.

23:22You think that getting to a place where you felt like you'd really mastered the D2C space set you up better for moving into retailers down the line? For sure. For sure. I mean, especially with ads, right? If you have really strong ads, those ads are also going to get served to the Sephora merchants, the Aero1 buyer. So just making sure that the ad is great and attention grabbing and something different than what's out there and, you know, good things will come. What is the creative genius behind your ads? You know, we have a lot of different kinds of ads. My favorite are the branded assets, the more design pieces, but, you know, it's the influencer ones always end up doing the best.