She Took 4 Months Off & GREW Monthly Revenue $10K+

0:00I was expecting 300 bucks from family and friends. In that very first day, I was getting orders from people I'd never heard of before. Word of mouth, right from the very beginning. And I'm so lucky that because we had such a good first month, the$16 ,000 month, I was able to get a production space right away.

0:19Hey everyone, welcome to Shopify Masters, your companion for starting and building a business. I'm your host, Adam Levinter. Being an entrepreneur is all about seeing an opportunity and going for it. not letting anything get in your way or slow you down. But how about when it's time to take a break? My guest today, Teak Chandler, is no stranger to the founder grind. I answer all my DMs. I remember who my customers are. It's really important that Teak and Chandler Honey are pretty much the same thing. Her business, Chandler Honey, offers raw honey infused with flavors like creme brulee, earl grey, lemon, ginger, and more.

0:52She's approaching 10 ,000 orders on Shopify and has no intentions of slowing down. My parents say they want to retire at 100 years. So that'll be 2037. What makes her story unique isn't just her growth from zero to over 10 ,000 in monthly revenue. It's how she's built systems that have allowed her business to actually maintain profitability and grow during her four-month maternity leave. The whole reason I wanted to become an entrepreneur in the first place is so that I could enjoy my life and enjoy taking a mat leave and enjoy balancing both things. Teek, when we were talking, we'll talk a ton about bees today.

1:27you were saying that the average beekeeper gets stung many times a day when I was working on the bee farm as a child I would get stung four times a day plus and it hurts every single time but your body eventually stops swelling up since I've moved to Toronto I'm a bit rusty in my bee sting skills so like when I go home now and get stung it's very obvious I'm rusty I swell up like crazy get made fun of. But yeah, it's dangerous stuff. But you said that it's good for us, right? To get stung? Yeah, that's what they say. So if you have arthritis, even they'll come and like put bee stings in areas you have arthritis.

2:02So I figured that since I got stung so much as a child, I've got to live forever, hopefully. So we're going to talk all things bees today, specifically Chandler Honey, which is now five years old, almost five years old. Wow. Launch November 2020. 20. But the family, your family. Correct. Has been in the business for what? Four generations? It's coming up. My parents say they want to retire at 100 years. So that'll be 2037. So it's been in the family for almost 100 years, which is crazy. And I'm just so happy to have like the history of Honey behind the brand and kind of continue the family business in my own unique way.

2:37It's been awesome. What is that way? Like what was the gap that you saw in 2020 that you thought you could fill? So when I was, I wanted to start the business kind of pre COVID, the pandemic was just kind of an accident that happened and actually pushed out my launch date. But what I was seeing in the market was just a bunch of ugly honey jars on shelves. And I don't know why, because honey is such a premium product and expensive product, really. And then in these really ugly bears or really like homemade labels kind of aesthetic. And I was like, somebody needs to do this better. someone is to give a beautiful home for this beautiful product.

3:13And let's zhuzh it up a little more. Let's infuse some gourmet ingredients into it as well. So that's the niche that I could see that needed to be found in the market. And then I saw myself fitting into that because there were no young women in this space. When we think of a beekeeper, we think of old white men. And so there's no young girls in this. So I just thought I could be a unique kind of face to this business. So do you launch online first or do you launch in a marketplace? What was the first? So I set a date that I was going to launch and because it was COVID, it was very difficult to markets at the time or launch in any way that I would maybe start with today.

3:53But I just launched online at first. And what I did then was really invest in product photography right from the beginning, even before we had any sales, because I knew that if people weren't going to be able to taste themselves. They needed to eat with their eyes. So really expensive product photography right from the very beginning. And I think that made it as successful as it was. Okay. And something about your first day was a major success because you had something like $2 ,700 in sales in the first day. I could not believe it. I was expecting 300 bucks from family and friends kind of thing.

4:22So I was stoked. And the month was great too, right? $16 ,000 in revenue in the first month? Correct. And I, again, so shocked. And it was mostly from me sharing on my own social media pages that I don't have a large following or anything. I'm just a regular person. And it was family and friends supporting, but also family and friends just sharing on their social medias as well. And then in that very first day, I was getting orders from people I'd never heard of before. So just kind of word of mouth right from the very beginning. And I'm so lucky that because we had such a good first month, the$16 ,000 month, I was able to get a production space right away.

4:54Like legally, I wasn't supposed to be doing this out of my kitchen at home. I I didn't tell anyone I was doing it out of my kitchen, but I was able to like properly get a production space and a CFIA certificate right off the bat because of the super successful launch. So is that a requirement for retail, for grocery, the CFIA requirement? Yeah. Actually, since COVID, they've changed the rules. So if you do up to, I think it's$50 ,000 a year in sales, you can be out of your kitchen now, but that was not the case at the time. So for anyone listening at home, don't make that a hurdle that you need to jump over.

5:26Just start and then I always ask for forgiveness rather than permission. So if they had found me out earlier, I would have said, yeah, it's on its way. I'm getting this certificate. Now at the size I am, I definitely need this CFIA certificate to sell in any store. Yes. Okay. So walk me through sort of the trajectory of the business from$16 ,000 in revenue to, you said,$200 plus retail partners to date. Correct. Correct. What are the key turning points do you think that happened along the way? Yeah, I had some really good wins in my first kind of year. Like Bell Canada, for example, was looking for someone to like have a honey to put in an employee appreciation box.

6:08So suddenly it went out to, I mean, they placed like, I want to say it was 2000 jars at that point. So that gets out to 2000 more people. And just as word of mouth spreads, these were like a bunch of tiny turning points throughout. and I'm just proving myself to every customer one at a time that this is a really quality product that you're going to love and just one store at a time. I treat my job even to this day, I feel like I'm a salesperson. My background is in tech sales as well. My job is to always be selling my products, sending cold emails, cold calling stores, doing demos at stores. I feel like all these are tiny little turning points of my business that just keep snowballing off each other.

6:48What is the marketing and sales strategy for Chandler today? I have experimented with paid ads before, and I feel like meta primarily prices their ads so perfectly that you will just make a tiny little bit of a profit and it'll get you hooked into spending more on ads just so you can get the feeling that you're growing and getting ahead. But I found myself getting nowhere and I was frustrated and spending all this money on ads. So I've completely stopped doing ads now. All of my marketing advertising right now is organic. And I'm just sharing myself and my story on my Instagram. And I have a really good email customer list that I like stay in touch with very well.

7:32It's pretty old school, but I'm just showing up for my existing customers and keeping them coming back for more, feeling like they know me through my social media presence and just continuing to post and have people get involved in the story. Okay, but that is a strategy. I mean, you stop the paid ads, but the alternative to paid is organic. So ultimately, you're doubling down now on organic and organic growth, which means you're leveraging your current email list, all the current assets that you have, be it social media on Instagram or Facebook or otherwise, your website, your newsletter. You must be thinking about sort of distribution of content across those platforms.

8:11And that, in effect, becomes the default marketing strategy. That's true. And it's so much more profitable to do it that way as well. Just keep it as in-house as possible. Is that time intensive for you? At times, yes. I feel like I get in the creative spirit every once in a while and batch a bunch of content. So I will write down either a bunch of ideas for social media posts. I will draft a few emails at a time or like at least get the bones right so that I can just plunk in like, here's what I've been up to in the last couple of months. It is a lot of work, but I just kind of do it when the mood strikes.

8:39I don't have a super strict schedule for myself. I want it to feel enjoyable so that my customers that I'm interacting with, they know that it's enjoyable as well. Do you think ultimately you will jump back into paid ads at some point on perhaps a new platform? Have you experimented with TikTok or some of these other available channels? I've experimented with TikTok, but not with paid TikTok ads. I can see myself trying again in the future. But right now what I'm doing feels very manageable. and I like that it feels very within my control. I am kind of the type of entrepreneur who will try everything and see what sticks.

9:17So I imagine I will keep trying things as they come, but right now I'm pretty happy to have this as a foundation. So we were talking about organic content. Do you think about the types of content that you're producing and what type of content do you think works best or does work best on Instagram? I'm always thinking what kind of content I want to produce. And I see it's so easy with stats, on Instagram or any social media platform, what does the best. And I know that people love to see my face. They love to see what I'm doing behind the scenes. They love to be involved in new flavors that I'm creating, all sorts of ways to just make the customer feel connected to me and my brand and that they want to be a part of the growing business has been super fun and that content does the best and I have the most fun creating it.

10:02Got it. Okay. So talk to me about the retail growth trajectory. Because the last we talked, which was a few years ago now, you definitely weren't in 200 retailers. I don't know, you're probably in a select few. What has that looked like over time? And are there certain retail partnerships that you think have driven the business to the next level? A lot of it is me just getting out there and just emailing. I'm trying to do, you know, 20 emails a week, more if I'm feeling ambitious and just getting more and more conversations with small business owners. I've learned what stores my honey does well in.

10:40That is not grocery stores, not your traditional food stores. That's where I thought I would hit it big, but no, it's actually the gifty stores and it's the souvenir stores and things like that, that I do very well. So I've kind of retargeted where I want to go and it's slower growth because you're not getting 50 grocery stores at a time. It's one or two at a time. Um, but yeah, they just keep building on each other. It's been great. quality, not the quantity in this regard. And I would assume there's a pricing element to this as well that doesn't fit with big grocery. This is premium. Correct.

11:14I found that the price point of my honeys were a little bit too high for traditional grocery store. If they're going to pay a premium for honey, they want and feel like they know their beekeeper. They want to feel connection with the brand, all of these things that wasn't quite conveyed on a grocery store shelf. But even from my perspective, it didn't make a lot of sense to keep going after grocery stores because they take such huge margins. They're asking for free fills. If it doesn't move in a certain amount of time, they're sending it back to you. It's often damaged product. It just wasn't a good fit for me.

11:45And it was an expensive lesson trying to like push myself into these grocery stores and have it go quite badly. But it's just made me refocus on things that are much more a better fit and much more profitable for myself and just a better fit for my brand. Speaking of fit for the brand, is there a dream retail partner that you'd love to be in? Yes. That you're not currently with? Indigo. I'm so close. They keep telling me not yet. Just hold on. And I'm, oh, I would love to be in there so much. Again, Canadian company. We're in Canada. That's right. Listen up. Indigo, hit me up. There you go. Okay.

12:19You've done white labeling. Yes. For other brands. For those viewers that don't understand what white labeling is, at least as a strategy, please explain this. White labeling is just taking my processes, sometimes my honey, sometimes not, and just creating a product for someone else with their branding on it rather than my branding. So because I've already invested in a production space and have this CFIA certification, I have access to honey if needed from my parents' farm. I've got all of these strengths that allow me to work with people who want their own honey brands and not have it say Chandler honey that I can leverage that.

12:59And that's a great recurring customer, customers that continually keep paying me to help me pay my bills so that I can not worry about rent and I can just worry about growing my own business. So it's been awesome. How do you advertise your white labeling capabilities? I feel like my customers want it to be a secret on their behalf. They want people to think that their honey is from their farm, of course. Sure. And that's not always. Or they want their customers to think that they're doing all the work behind the scenes, things like that. Yeah, I just have to keep it a little bit secret for my own customers.

13:35But then I don't advertise it as much as perhaps I could. It's just kind of been one of those happy accidents where people are coming to me being like, hey, I see you have this facility. Do you have any capabilities to take on a little bit more? And I say, yes. It actually started from me doing custom labels for companies like that Bell Canada deal where I did put Bell right on the jar. And then I said, hey, this is actually pretty easy and pretty affordable for me. Why don't I do other custom labels? So I do labels for wedding favors. I do them for like baby showers, all sorts of things. And then as I was getting quite good at that, yeah, why can't I just white label for another business?

14:14I think that's an interesting avenue for startups in general that tend to pivot accidentally, like you start to develop version one of a product, but then you have all these other ancillary capabilities that you could unlock as potential revenue streams. But at times, you're so deep into the product or v1 of the product that you tend to overlook some of the diversification revenue streams that could be unlocked. Totally agree. And that's the difference between getting too much of your blinders on versus being open and saying yes to all sorts of things. A lot of opportunities that have happened for me to diversify my revenue streams have not been from my own brain.

14:55It's been people asking me about something and me just being like, yeah, why not? And then we'll see if it works. So we can cut it if it doesn't, but it could be awesome. Yeah. Because I would think that out of your production facility, given your expertise with this particular brand and product that you could produce almost any consumable that feels like a one-step extension from honey. Yes. I think so too. I think I'd need to update my certificate to expand from honey, but that's an easier thing than starting from scratch. Um, I absolutely could. and I've got more space than I need. I have the smallest commercial space I could possibly find and it's still far too big for what I need.

15:34So yeah, I'm bringing on. Yeah, one of the viewers can correct me, but I'm thinking like you could become a co-packer. Yeah. I don't know if that's the term. I'm not in the CPG space, but you're essentially talking about that function, right? And I definitely could see myself doing that in the future. I actually feel like I owe the success of my brand a little bit to not accepting a co-packer in the first place. It might be different for everyone. I'm not saying working with a co-packer is always bad, but I wanted to keep it as close to myself as possible from the very beginning. And so that's why I invested in a production space early.

16:06So that allows me to have so much control over what the product looks like, the quality control of it, and then allows me opportunities like potential co-packing or just white labeling right now. So this word control that you've mentioned a few times in this conversation, this sort of extends into your approach to building your team, which is still very lean. Yes. You still control many elements of the business to date. Correct. You've implemented all of these systems that you've designed that were advantageous for mat leave for you, which we can talk about. Do you feel like at some point control, too much control becomes a hindrance in terms of how big or how scaled the business can get?

16:51No, there definitely will be an inflection point of where I cannot be the only one at my company who touches the laptop. Right now it currently is. So all accounting I do, ordering ingredients, anything administrative related I do, there will come a point where that doesn't make sense anymore. but I've been able to become a lot more effective even as one person by automating things and setting them up myself so I can still have control over them but just leaning on technology a little bit. Like even through Shopify innately having the checkout cart reminder go out to anyone who's browsing on my site is to loop those customers back in, grab them if possible or set up a sequence so that if they're giving their email address, I have a sequence of emails that goes out that tries to bring them back in, Tells them about my story, tells them about the brand and tries to get them to be a customer kind of thing.

17:42Setting things up like that has been wonderful. You having control over all of these different functions in the business. How do you make sure you have time for both the business and the personal stuff? Whatever pays the bills first gets priority first. I feel like that's business 101. But yeah, anything to deal with customers, especially my wholesale customers, that comes first. Getting new sales kind of comes second. And then everything else could run a little bit behind schedule if needed, if we needed to be more flexible. Yeah, designing new boxes. Like I have this beautiful box here that was a little bit slower to launch than I would have liked.

18:16But you just got to constantly be reshuffling things in your business. And then at some point during the day, if you're like, yeah, it's home time now. I need to spend time with my family. That comes first. And I'm actually, I've gotten quite good at being able to turn it off. So if I'm home, I'm properly home. I'm properly focused on my family. And then when work comes around, it's time for work. It's been great. Do you think from a branding and positioning standpoint that it's a stronger story, having that deep connection between Teak and Chandler than it would be if you were more, say, divorced from the brand?

18:52The reason I ask is because it feels like we're moving into a moment in time where consumers want to know who the founder is. Yes. They want to hear the founder's story. They don't just want to buy from, say, a honey company. I'd agree with you. And I even in selecting the name for my business, Chandler Honey, I wanted it to feel personal to me. And also it just helps me maintain a really high standard for the product itself, customer service, everything, because my name is attached to everything. And so I've really liked that aspect of it. And I also love that I still answer all of the comments personally on my social media site.

19:28I answer all my DMs. I remember who my customers are, all these things. I think it's really important that Teak and Chandler Honey are pretty much the same thing. So I'm trying to hold on to that for as long as possible. Okay. So you become pregnant last year. Your daughter's, yeah, congrats. Thank you. Your daughter's four months. Okay. So when you become pregnant, you've got basically control over all of these elements of the business. That's unsustainable as you go deeper into your pregnancy, or is it? I mean, you start thinking about a different approach to the business and all these new systems and processes and hires that have to be in place.

20:06I feel like a lot of mothers, new mothers, come on to platforms like this and talk about it in this specific way. It's like, how do I let the baby not ruin all of the progress that I've made or like get in the way of all the success? I always approached it differently. the whole reason I wanted to become an entrepreneur in the first place is so that I could enjoy my life and enjoy taking a mat leave and enjoy balancing both things. So in a way, it was, this was always the plan is to, to have my own company in order to be a mother, rather than letting it detract from my business, if that makes any sense.

20:46That said, it did kick me into overdrive of like, okay, I need to set up things. Well, I need to train my employee a little bit more so that she can pack orders if needed. I need to trust her to do more things. But ultimately, I was comfortable with the idea of, okay, if things slow down for three or four months, as long as we're keeping the lights on, that's completely fine. This is what life's all about. The sales goals are not the goal. It's the family goals that are the most important thing. What are the best systems and tools that you stumbled upon? So like we've already talked about, I think revenue diversification was a huge one.

21:19So white labeling, e-commerce stores, but I also have someone sharing my lease with me currently. And this kind of the pregnancy triggered this more than anything else. I had someone approach me saying, hey, I'm doing my business out of my apartment and I'm going to be moving in with my boyfriend. Is there any way I can like join you in your lease? So we don't have any paperwork done up or anything like that. But she takes about six feet by six feet of storage in my production space, but then she works in the evenings anyway. She does like infused essential oils. And as long as she's not in my food safe room, she works there in the evenings.

21:56I almost never see her. And yet she pays me rent every month. So that just makes my life so much less stressful that I can for sure have that money coming in. And then for sure having recurring revenue come in from my white labeling contracts. My e-commerce is strong. I've just got a bunch of different avenues to rely back on. And then I can enjoy maternity leave the way that I want to. What about e-commerce systems specifically, like actual automation tools, software applications or otherwise that have made your life easier? Yeah. I'm a really big proponent of Flowdesk. Flowdesk. Yes. That's who I do my emails with.

22:33They're beautiful emails. They do integrate with Shopify well as well. And so just pre-batching emails and sending them out at certain dates, but also having email sequences so that if anyone's signing up for my newsletter, they are getting a, hey, here's Teak. Here's a little bit about the brand a couple of days later. Here's some recipes you might like. Here's some more things that you might find interesting. Just getting sequences like that set up really allows me to do less work on the e-commerce side thing and lets my conversion rate much better. So all these automations that you've set up, how effective have they been?

23:10It's gone super well. And in fact, the time I've been on Matly, my revenues have maintained themselves, if not even grown. Like I just have stores reordering. I have customers continuing to come back. There's been so much less effort for my part. But all of the things that I've done to build this business over the past four and a half years have created a really solid foundation that just make things keep coming better and better. Now that you're on the other side of the pregnancy, you're back in the business. You're here. Yeah, I'm here. I'd say I'm back to working 15 to 20 hours a week, which is perfect.

23:44That's like, I get to get out of the house. I get to feel like me, have my own identity, but still spend so much time with the baby. So it's perfect right now. What does the next phase of the business look like? Do you have aspirations to scale this to the next revenue milestone? Are you looking for angel investment or venture capital, anything like that? As you can probably guess, my need for control makes me not want to sell any portion of my business at all. And I know that probably keeps me a little bit smaller than I could be, but I really enjoy my life. And I enjoy getting to go to the office on my own terms and not have anyone breathing down my throat or asking me to make spreadsheets, all sorts of things, pros and cons, but I'm just really enjoying my life right now.