How to Save Lives & Build a Brand

0:00I was a long time bike rider, never wore a helmet, but a friend and mentor of mine got in a bad accident. He passed away on impact and he wasn't wearing a helmet.

0:13When the entire bike helmet industry is screaming, you need this for safety, Gloria Huang is doing the opposite. At Thousand, she started with a mission to save a thousand lives by making beautiful helmets that people actually want to wear. If you're ever in a crash, we'll replace your helmet for free, for life. We've replaced over 1 ,300 helmets. helmets. Within 24 hours, her idea was fully funded thanks to over 2 ,000 people on Kickstarter, and the business has not slowed down since. How do we solve someone's functional pain points, and how do we solve someone's emotional pain points? Thousand has since hit 10 years in business, brought on REI and the Clif Bar Family Office as lead investors, and has grown customer bases in over 20 countries.

0:52With her dedication to gather the most customer insights, Gloria has learned how to fit into someone's lifestyle instead of the other way around. The goal is to not get close to your competition to always get further differentiated. I'm Serena Smith, and this is Shopify Masters, your companion for starting and scaling a business. Hi. Hi. Thanks for being here. Thanks for having me. I think something that is so fascinating about this is that though I'm a bike rider, so I'm guilty of this, though we all know that we should wear a helmet, it seems like an incredibly difficult task to actually get people to wear one.

1:29You've been in this game now for a decade. What's your understanding of that opposition and how have you tackled overcoming it? I guess from my perspective, when you're trying to get someone to like change a behavior, going from no helmet to getting up to them to wear a helmet, shaming them is not like the correct response. I think right now when people want you to wear a helmet, you're like, oh, you should wear a helmet because you need to be safe. It's not the responsible thing to do. You know, there's PSAs out there, people like them showing a helmet, getting hit on the head and, you know, putting people in fear.

1:57And I guess from my perspective, like if you're trying to get people to change behavior, fear is not like a great motivator, but to get someone to want to do something is more interesting. So I think that's what Thousand was really founded upon. Can you not only sell a product, but can you actually make helmets people actually want to wear? Our whole design premise and our whole mission has been really around like, how do you make a helmet cool? And how do you change like the perception around a product that's maybe like a safety item to a lifestyle accessory? How do you make a helmet cool? That's a great question.

2:28I think you make a helmet cool by like, here's an example. Like when we thought about why helmets weren't cool, if you think about just the imagery of them, they're kind of these sci-fi, you know, racy, Bluetooth-y things, and they don't feel like they resonate with something you want to do. Riding your bikes is really like joyful. So like, how do you solve that disconnect between, you know, the joy of writing and safety? And to try to make something cool, like we went back to honestly the 60s, the 50s for like inspiration and Steve McQueen. Like we were like, well, what are elements of cool that we can pull out that make people want to wear something because they think it's cool?

3:00So like when you look at all of our helmets, they're based off of like motorcycle helmets or moto helmets that you could have found in your grandparents' basements, like in the 50s or 60s. One of our best-selling colorways for the past 10 years. It's just a striped red, white, and blue. And it's like a reference from a Steve McQueen picture we found a long time ago. And I guess for us, it's like finding these like subtle hints of like what makes something cool. And it's kind of bringing it all together in a product to convey like a feeling more than anything. So even our products, they have like leather straps.

3:33It's supposed to because it's supposed to feel like a motorcycle helmet or a Vespa helmet. It has like little trim. And again, it's supposed to reference for motorcycle helmets. So I think Helmets in itself are not uncool. It's the perception of bicycle helmets. So largely, how do we change that perception? It's just not by making it look like a bicycle helmet at all. It's making it look like something that feels like it's something you would have wanted to wear all this time. Right. Yeah. Taking the idea of a helmet as sort of this obligatory, uncool necessity that you need to something that you actually genuinely want to engage with that contributes to the freedom and the joy.

4:07It's such an interesting repositioning. And I think even more so for you, because Thousand was born out of personal tragedy in your life, right? Yeah. Yeah. My story was, you know, when people say they don't wear a helmet now, I get that. Because Thousand started for me because I also didn't wear a helmet. I was a longtime bike rider, never wore a helmet, just kind of thought they were goofy looking. But a friend and mentor of mine, you know, got in a bad accident. He passed away on impact from that accident and he wasn't wearing a helmet. And when I heard that, I knew, same as like a lot of people who don't wear helmets, like I know I need to wear one just to be responsible for myself.

4:47But when I looked out on the market, there wasn't anything I liked. There was things that I felt like were kind of passable, pretty sci-fi looking, didn't really fit my personality. So I didn't buy one. I just stopped riding my bike so much because I'm not a hardcore bike rider. I'm a casual recreational cyclist. And I think that's where A Thousand started, like with a mission of, you know, if you can change that perception, people have a bike helmets, you can help save lives. You can literally save lives by getting people to wear helmets for the first time. And for me, that's one of the most impactful things I see in our business.

5:19Like 25 % of our customers in our customer survey say this is the first time they're wearing a helmet. Yeah. And for me, like from a mission-driven place. We've been able to help save lives just by making something that people actually want to wear. It's built into the name, right? Yeah. Thousand, it was about you wanting to save a thousand lives. Yeah. Originally Thousand, again, our brand's a mission-driven brand. So like originally the name Thousand came from how can we help save a thousand lives. It's really cool for us. We track that statistic if we can help save a thousand lives by our accident replacement policy.

5:53So for our business, we offer, I think the only lifetime guarantee that if you're ever in a crash or an accident, we'll replace your helmet for free for life. So in our lifetime of 10 years now, I think we've replaced over 1300 helmets. It's been a powerful thing just to be able to fulfill your mission. It's been really fun because it's our 10 year anniversary. We have this new, thank you. I appreciate it. It's crazy. It's 10 years. I know, but as a continuation of our mission, you know, we've, we've crossed our thousand lives saved threshold. We have this new initiative we've got going on right now called protect your melon.

6:25So we'll, we'll literally pop up on, um, bike paths, like as a fruit stand. And if bikers are going by and they stop and they're like, what are you, what are you doing here? And they don't have a helmet on. And if they tell us the reason they don't want to wear a helmet or, you know, they don't have a helmet, we just give them a free one on the spot. So for us, that's kind of our new, new way to help start saving more lives. And have you found that most of the people stopping are open to taking a helmet and putting it on? Yeah, because like when you look at the bike helmet market, you can tell like this market, even though it's the largest market, has been really unserved.

6:57It's the recreational market. And the overwhelming thing we always hear when people say they don't want to wear a helmet is they don't like the style. They don't think they're convenient. They're bulky. They're uncomfortable. And these are really solvable problems at the end of the day. But I think the industry was designing for an enthusiast market that's high tech, that's going 50 miles. The normal person is commuting two to three miles to work. They're going to their local coffee shop. So their needs are much different from that other market. So when they find our product, honestly, they're like, wow, this is kind of like all of my problems solved in one.

7:29You could very clearly see when you were starting Thousand that there was a problem that needed to be solved. That the current helmet offerings were only catering to a certain kind of consumer at the time. Yeah, correct. Like when we started, the industry was very price to value. It's basically how many different, you know, product features can you fit in this certain amount of price? It was very wholesale centric in the sense that like all helmet companies at the time were really designing for the retail buyer. So the retail buyer is like, I need something at a$60 price point that is black that has this many events that does X, Y, and Z.

8:03And the product development team will be like, cool, we'll design exactly that. And the challenge with that type of kind of legacy industry is then you no longer design things for customers or people. You're designing things for a retail buyer to sell into a store. And I think, you know, when we started Thousand, we really had a design thinking approach. Like how do we solve someone's functional pain points and how do we solve someone's emotional pain points? And that's how we really started with our product briefs. Like how do you solve a person's problems, not just like in a list that, you know, will meet a price point, but how do you make them feel good about wanting to wear something?

8:39Did you just inherently understand that that was the approach or was this the product of gleaning consumer insights? I know that's big for you. Yeah, that's big. I think I'm in that school of like ideal design thinking where you really try to understand like a customer insight. Like to me, that's what makes solving a problem really interesting. You have to understand where your customer's coming from. So even in the beginning, when we started Thousand, we did customer surveys and we still do customer surveys and we still do customer interviews. And really, you glean so much from that information.

9:12Like you find out people don't care that much about Bluetooth in their helmet. They don't care that much how lightweight it is like by the gram. They do care about the color. They do care about the fit and finish. They do care about like, do I have to lug this helmet to my workplace? So I guess when you really understand your customer from a needs set perspective and you really do deep dive quantitative, qualitative interviews, you get like real insights you can solve problems off of and then build better product off of. Customer surveys. Yeah. Big for you. Big for us. It sounds like you're getting some insights with this protect your melon stand.

9:48And we do qualitative surveys too. Like not even surveys, like we'll get on the phone with, you know, we're launching a lot of kids stuff right now and we'll get on the phone with kids and their parents. And, you know, it's a chaotic environment and we're just talking them through like, do you like this? Do you not like this? Why don't you like to wear X? Why don't you like to do Y? If you were to design your perfect new product of this, what would it look like? Can you draw me a picture? and you gain a lot of insights from these things. Like it's not just like, what does the customer survey say?

10:18Qualitative, let me design something. Like you've got to listen to the customer because a seven-year-old kid is not going to tell you exactly what they want. You know, if we're designing a bike basket, for example, and they're saying, I want something where I can put my rocks in it and I can put my X in it and I want my water bottle in it and I want to be able to do X, Y, and Z. You don't have to design a product that can fit rocks, but you do have to design a product that can hold lots of various things that kids are going to take on their adventures. You know, they are saying, I need a water bottle.

10:46That means they're going out for a long period of time. So how do you design something that lasts and that can be written with them? So I would say like in that insights gathering, it's not just hearing what the customer is asking for. It's kind of inferring like what's the larger pinpoint that you need to resolve for them when you're designing a product. Is that a skill set that you feel like you've always had as a human being, that ability to just sort of connect the dots and read into the nuance? It's funny, I don't have a business background. I was a liberal arts major. So I had a psychology.

11:17So naturally you're an entrepreneur. So yeah, so yeah, if you're a liberal arts background, you're like, what can I possibly do in this job market? But for me, like, my background is psychology. And I would say, like, I don't know if it's a chicken or the egg thing, but maybe something I've always had is like, I've always been trying to understand what the other person has been asking. In all things in life, I think one of the most important skills is to try to understand what does this other person value and how do I deliver value? Because that's ultimately what a product company does at the end of the day.

11:47You can listen to what people are saying or you can listen to what people are actually telling you. And it's like there's a distinction. You have to get to that sort of like underneath layer, you know. It's not always in the language itself. You have to sort of infer meaning. The psychology component, I think, is super compelling and is probably a big reason why Thousand is still here a decade in, right? Like that deep understanding of who your consumer really is and what they actually want. And leaving some of that other seemingly important stuff that turns out to be a little bit superfluous by the wayside.

12:24Because Thousand's been successful in our category, there's lots of other brands who have tried to, you know, kill us. They've literally made products that they've called Thousand Killers. Really? Yeah. And it's unnerving because they're bigger than you. And they haven't because at the end of the day, my perspective is they haven't started from a place of they're trying to solve a customer problem. They're trying to come from a place where they can out-compete you on price to value or they're trying to out-compete you on distribution. But at the end of the day, the customer does decide on what products solve their needs the best.

12:57So I think that's why we're still alive and kicking and, you know, doing great things. A good mentor of mine taught me this, and it's something I've always tried to apply, but when there's competition and there's pressure for you to go more towards like the middle in terms of like price to value and being able to serve every single customer. But the more you try to serve like everyone, the less differentiated you get. So like, I think our perspective always has been when we're making product, we really have to understand the customer insight and we really have to understand where we are in like the XY axis of competition.

13:30And like the goal is always to be out further up into the right, like to not get close to your competition, to always get more and more further differentiated. And for us, by getting more further differentiated, it's us understanding and delivering customer insights better than anyone else. I would imagine like, you know, you're, you're steeled at this point. You've been doing this a decade. It probably takes a lot to shake you at this point. But I'm thinking back to like the first time that a thousand killer came out or you caught word of it. I would imagine it was kind of scary. Like, how did you navigate it in that moment?

14:05You know, someone gave me a good phrase to describe like entrepreneurship. And that was like firefighting with enthusiasm. And that felt true. And it still feels true. And I think in that time period, that's the moment you have to like dig deep and understand like, who are you as a brand? And when you have competition who are trying to like outdo you, to me, the only way to like continue to outdo competition who's bigger than you that has more resources than you is to keep just getting like more differentiated. So I think at that time, if I'm honest, I wasn't too nervous because I knew we could always do what we've always done at Thousand better than everyone else.

14:42Just because lots of other companies that are legacy players in our industry are like trying to serve like five different customer groups. So they're trying to serve for helmets. They're trying to serve the mountain bike rider, the gravel rider, the road rider, the recreationalist, all of these other things. And at Thousand, we've always been trying to serve two customers like Urban Traveler and the family. So for us, like our perspective has always been share of closet versus more and more kind of like different categories. So I think that's why we'll always win in this category because we've always been wanting to go deeper with our customer.

15:15We don't want to, you know, I would love to go into the mountain bike category because I could sell a$200 helmet. I'm not that customer. I don't know how to mountain bike, so I don't think I can solve any sort of customer problem with any sort of real integrity. When confronted with competition and the need to say, how do I outcompete them? My perspective is like, continue to double down on what you do and get more aggressive and dig down deeper into what you do. If you try to be like your competition, unfortunately, you just do what your competition does, but worse because that's not your skill set.

15:44My perspective is always like, lean into what we do well and really, really double down on that. The proof is in your success and in your progress. You're now in more than 20 countries, right? Given your deep orientation toward consumer insights, what have you found as you're entering other markets in terms of needing to alter design principles to fit the culture of those different places? Yeah, it's been really interesting. So a big portion of our business that's international distributors. So we are distributed in everywhere from South Korea to, you know, Spain or Poland. And it's really interesting because you kind of have to understand what that culture values before you kind of position yourself and your assortment needs to change for that culture or even your QA process.

16:30So for example, like we were big in South Korea and growing now in Japan and the QA standards there are, you know, double what they are in the U.S. You have to make sure every single product is perfect going out there. In Germany, it's a highly functional market. So, you know, we're a colors, materials and finishes brand and we lean into style and we lean into convenience. But in Germany, as our market, we really have to play up our functional competitive advantages because people want, they want price to value, but they want it to look good. So like the way we message is also inversed in certain places.

17:02And then we also have to think through like special makeups. Like in some markets, we develop colors now that have to be global. When we first started, you know, at Thousand, color development was me just saying like, what colors are cool? What can we put together and what do I like? And now I have to think through like, okay, when we're developing a new line, like where are we going to sell this into? Is it just going to be in our, you know, our dot-com channel or is it going to be into a gear count or it's going to be in our distributors? And if it is, what are the colors that we have to have?

17:30What are the features that we have to have to make sure it's a global line? Or is it just going to be a regional product? So I think when you're developing or you're growing internationally, your product line has to be able to flux with you in terms of being able to serve each market. As you started expanding internationally, were there any early mistakes or learnings that you can share? For you, from the design perspective is one thing, but you've also got what I would imagine is daylight between the safety regulations in each of these markets, right? That's a huge one. So like, again, in our market, it's not as simple as deciding we're going to sell into France one day and we can sell into France.

18:05You have to get the safety certifications for every single market. And they're different. The EU is different than South Korea is different from, you know, Japan is different from Australia. So you've got to make sure you can get all of your product safety certified and that it can pass and exceed safety regulations. So you feel really good about the integrity of the product. South Korea was a great example. When we first started to sell into South Korea, that's where we learned about quality. We had no idea about quality standards until we started to sell in the South Korean market. And we would get back pictures from our distributors on an individual basis, helmets that she didn't think passed QA standards.

18:39So out of 2 ,000 helmets, you know, our distributor had QA'd every single one of them to see that she didn't like a paint, you know, the paint was there. There's a little piece of dust here, like this and that. So we started to really understand, wow, like we have to be able to build pricing in our QA standards for different markets. So like we maybe have to have a little higher of a price for Korea because we're going to have to reject twice as many helmets in the QA process. It's really been a fun learning journey to like understand like whatever. It's not super generalized, but like different countries do value certain things.

19:14So how do we adapt to, you know, what customers need in that area has been a fun journey. Who's the most stringent safety standards? Most stringent safety standards? I would say no one has the most stringent safety standards. It's more of like, what do you prefer? Funnily enough, it's like in the EU, like they have a higher preference towards like protecting against low speed impacts. In the U.S., it's high-speed impact. So it's kind of getting the right mix. Honestly, a little bit. So it's kind of getting the right mix per country. But I would say for us, it's just always important that we can meet and exceed standards at every time, given that we're a safety company at the end of the day.

19:50I remember you saying at some other time that one of the best pieces of advice that you got from one of your mentors is that anytime you stop operating from what you know in your gut, you're in trouble. It's like something along those lines, right? Yeah, I think the best piece of advice I've ever gotten from a mentor was that founders get in trouble when they don't follow their gut. And that was like very true 10 years ago, because I was like undoing a problem. And 10 years ago, that is still the best piece of advice I've gotten. I think like one of the best examples I've had is that, you know, as Thousand grew over time, we did all the things people do when you grow, you get a leadership team, you start to learn how to delegate, you have X, Y, and Z.

20:29And I got further and further disconnected with like our product roadmap. And I started to realize for probably a couple of years, we weren't putting out things that I was super proud of. We were making iterations on products. We were making things that kind of were kind of centered. Like, again, our whole philosophy of moving further up into the right, we were really getting away from. So, you know, in this last couple of years, I made a pretty conscious decision to take over our product roadmap. And it's been kind of getting to the heart of what Thousand does. And, you know, it's been really interesting because when I reoriented our team around this new roadmap, I really had us double down on our product DNA, style, convenience, you know, safety.

21:08And it was hard for our team to heal because they had had these hardcore product people who were kind of making sure we could design global lines, but weren't necessarily breaking the mold for our customers. And what was really interesting about taking back over the product roadmap is like, I really oriented our team around how Thousand started. Like Thousand was successful because we were, if you've heard of the term like Blue Ocean, we were a Blue Ocean company. Like when the sea is red from competition, like of just like knocking each other off and competing and press to value, we were differentiated.

21:40And that's why we succeeded. For me, taking over the product roadmap was really getting back to like this root of what Thousand did well. I think there is like an idea of the older you get as a company, you have to radically change who you are because that's how you have to adapt to the new market. And that's how you have to compete. And that can be true in times if like your competition set has really drastically changed. But you know, when I looked at our competition set, they were almost exactly the same. And what I realized is it's not that our competition was changing to get better. It's that we had changed to get more common.