Rob Law of Trunki: A masterclass in resilience

0:00Welcome to Strategy and Tragedy. I'm your host, Stephanie Melodia. And if you are a budding entrepreneur, a first time founder or scaling your business, then you are absolutely in the right place. And particularly with this episode specifically, I cannot wait to interview Rob Law, serial entrepreneur, most famously known for being the founder of Trunky, the children's luggage brand. Rob, welcome to Strategy and Tragedy. Thanks for inviting me. All right, so I'm sure you're sick of it at this point because obviously this first occurred over a decade ago, but we do need to kickstart your story with the Dragon's Den fiasco.

0:36So to bring everyone up to speed really quickly, you got pulled apart on Dragon's Den, quite literally, where Theopophetus, one of the dragons, literally pulled apart one of your products. I don't know if it's your prototype, but one of the actual suitcases there on the show aired on national TV around the country. obviously must have felt horrible, but take us back to that moment. What was going through your mind when that was happening? The turning point in the den from a good pitch to things tumbling downhill out of my control was when Theo got a little bit too aggressive with my pink Trixie suitcase.

1:10I did not expect the strap to break so easily, I've got to be honest. Yeah, it was almost two decades ago now. Oh, two decades ago. and it was a very weird out-of-body experience being there in front of the dragons but also on reflection just having no control over the car crash that was happening in front of me and I just couldn't understand why it was such an issue it was a production sample and the toe strap if you pull it hard the plastic the original plastic clip did bend a bit and he saw it bend so he thought i'll pull it as hard as i can and it popped off it didn't break just popped off and i was like well if that's a problem although i've just turned richard farley around the studio you know that can be made stronger and they just went absolutely wild at me like and theo said what was it you shouldn't come on here with problems that can be solved it's like well uh yeah pretty much the definition of all products and businesses you get something out you find something wrong and you tweak it that must have left such a sound taste in your mouth with the whole like dragon's den like show yeah but then it carried on i mean there yeah peter jones said you think you got something i tell you you don't your business is worthless your brand's worth nothing i was like what and it was i just started trading but i had a brand name had a product um i had something to get get started but yeah when the cameras stopped rolling and we're in there for an hour and a half whatever i was at the top of the steps and i thought oh that's a bugger i haven't got any money which i really needed a bit of mentoring and by the time i got to the bottom of the stairs I was thinking oh Christ I wish I'd invent a time machine and not ride on suitcase this could be quite damaging to the business if it ever airs yeah uh the BBC said they'll give us six weeks notice the season three starts airing no no word from the BBC halfway through the season no words I'm thinking I've got away with this but just to make sure I went down to local news agents picked up the radio times just to check and my tail's in there what was it to Tuesday night, BBC Two, nine o 'clock, and it said, wheelie rubbish, Dragon's Den.

3:17The colour drains my face. I was like, oh, I thought I got away with this. What a setback. But of course, this is one of many setbacks, which is one of the many reasons that makes you a fantastic guest on a show called Strategy and Tragedy. So we are going to recount some of those. But what I'm aware of is that you did have a deal lined up. So obviously there was that gap between recording that show and it actually airing. So obviously you've taken a hit emotionally. That's such a blow to your ego, your self-confidence and all the rest of it. You had a deal lined up, but then what was the damage after the episode actually aired on TV?

3:54Well, I didn't have a deal with Dragon's Day. No, there was a separate... Did you have a separate customer deal? Yeah, my first customer was actually the Museum of Modern Art in New York. and they had seen a design blog where I posted a press release. So I'd sold 600 to those guys and started exporting internationally. I was finding it quite hard initially in the UK. None of the high street retailers would take my call. They kept passing me around different departments and all wanted to take the risk of the trunky. The classic startup challenge I had was luggage buyers or luggage manufacturers thought it was a toy.

4:29Toy buyers and toy manufacturers thought it was luggage and no one would take the product on initially. This was one of the other things I wanted to come to you about, which was that repositioning, going from a toy to luggage. So let's just talk about that because how did you manage to successfully kind of position yourself in a way that consumers could easily understand? Yeah, it was a long startup journey from idea whilst at university in 97 to actually starting trading in 2006. So this nine year journey of initially rejection from manufacturers, then graduating in product design, working in Taiwan, New York and Australia.

5:08So I did the whole traveling thing and then came back in 2002. I found a startup toy company really keen on the idea. So I licensed it to them and over a three year period, they just had one customer in the Middle East and Trunky had never been to the UK, to Europe, to the US. So I was really frustrated by their lack of success. They ended up going into voluntary liquidation and during that three-year period I took a job as a design consultant in Bristol and my largest customer was Unilever and I was inventing all these products with these big name brands like electronic deodorant cans for links or acts as they call it in Europe, electronic devices to put more bleach down the toilet for Domestos and just all this junk that people didn't need and I was really kind of struggling to get out of bed in the morning ever since I was 14 I wanted to be a product designer I was now at the peak of my career and I was completely disillusioned.

6:05Wow but Trunky's still in the background. Well Trunky was with this Trunky was with this license with the toy company and then when they phoned me up in October 2005 saying they were going into voluntary liquidation couldn't represent Trunky anymore I very quickly kind of thought well actually here's an opportunity for me to have a go myself I now know about the power of branding with my work with Unilever and maybe it isn't a toy or luggage. It's it could be marketed as a lifestyle brand to parents. Interesting. So this almost gave you an opportunity to kind of reinvent Trunky. And it's always like the Renaissance after that, the Phoenix from the Flames.

6:40I have to ask, I mean, we haven't even gone that far into your journey yet, but already I need to ask, like, where does this fire come from for you? and specifically with Trunky because you've had so many like full starts and failures and setbacks you know Dragon's Den again I'm sure you're sick of talking about it at this point but like obviously that's one of the most famous things as well it's one of many setbacks what was it that kept you going like where did that belief in this children's luggage brand come from well it was more just a side hustle and a slow burn so it wasn't I wasn't waking up every morning thinking right I'm going to make it work today it was just like let's try and find a home for it and at the time I didn't want to run a business I just wanted to be a product designer so in the earlier days it was just give it to someone else to do and then I could become a product designer which is what I trained to become um and then after as I said kind of struggling to get out of bed in the morning I was then like this could be an opportunity to have a go at um and there were many other challenges we had the hand luggage ban of 2006 exactly yeah I was going come on to that as well.

7:47So that was coming home just before the summer after working down the warehouse fixing up some stock. The German World Cup was on. I wanted to see how England got on. So I turned the telly on and there was a news flash and the news presenter was saying the government have foiled a liquid bomb threat. And as a result, they've decided to ban hand luggage. Colour drains from my face. And I'm like, what? So the very product I invented, I'd taken nine years to get to market was now banned from its primary and fundamental use of being used as hand luggage. And so how did you overcome that? So that challenge was really around kind of quickly realising what can I control and what can't I so phoning up Heathrow, Department of Transport, Virgin BA, anyone I could think of was very clearly a waste of my time and I couldn't influence anything there so I quickly learnt what I could control and that was pivoting the marketing message talk about Trunkey being used for staycations I developed a cow print Frisian cow Trunkey for that messaging but also international was really taking off so I was exporting to the US to Japan Australia and most of those markets didn't have the band so it was kind of leaning into that and pushing international yeah incredible so I know I'm picking up on your story already that like you're very much product designer first right like more of this creative you've got an idea you want to put it out there not so much an entrepreneur at least assuming that label at least in those early days you sort of mentioned like giving it someone else you turn it into a business but ultimately you became the man to lead that um what do you tell yourself like in those tough moments those setbacks like when it would be easier to go and get another job as a product designer quick one so sorry to interrupt so i'm sure that you are on the edge of your seat listening to this interview at least i hope so i'm so aware of all the other podcasts that are already out there so the fact that you've decided to tune in and listen to this one is not lost on me if you can just go that one step further and hit that follow or subscribe button doesn't cost a thing takes two seconds now is your chance to do that it means so much really appreciate your support thank you so much now let's get back to the interview when it would be easier to go and get another job as a product designer um i don't know for some reason they don't seem that insurmountable insurmountable to me at the time i guess i'm uh i guess i'm thinking about um having faced quite a few challenges in my personal life as well it's kind of not that big a deal that there will be a way through this i've just got to face up to it as quickly as possible and move on i've kind of learned that setbacks can be reframed as superpowers so kind of facing into these quickly kind of helps you get over them if you can use your energy wisely and move on and carry on and you might be pivoting you might be being redirected somewhere but it's not actual failure it's kind of moving forward yeah yeah i love that i think where some of us spend maybe too long on linkedin or too long with our head down it can feel like actual failure and i think getting that perspective in those moments is so vital you dangled the kind of personal thing there lightly so if anyone doesn't really know you suffer from cystic fibrosis yeah so was that what you were referring to and if so how has that helped you to exercise your resilience muscle yeah so that is probably the foundation of my resilience being born with this uh the is the most common genetically inherited disease that affects your lungs and your digestive system but in the late 70s when i was born the average life expectancy was lucky to be to make it to double figures um and spent most of my childhood with my twin sister in and out of hospital, strapped to various ventilators and inhalers and loads of medication.

11:32But then as the science improved, life expectancy improved, so we made it to teenagers and then the goal was like 30, it was an opportunity, we might make it to 30. But sadly my sister passed when we were 16, which was devastating, but it taught me an incredible life lesson about life is short and to make the most of it and to kind of face into the challenges and hurdles and just just make the most of my life nothing was going to stop me from doing what I wanted to do yeah I can't even begin to imagine like how how do you process that like something that again like these aren't real failures like we're talking about life and death like easily puts things back into perspective but unless you haven't gone through that yourself personally what can we borrow from you well I think part of it was not actually processing it uh which is not necessarily a healthy thing but you but i internally processed it to try and give me a real focus and i think before kate passed i wasn't that driven um and then afterwards then i just wanted to make the most of everything at university my mates called me the duracell buddy because i just party hard work hard and just live life to the full um and And then I focused that energy on the business.

12:49And yeah, initially it wasn't about making any money. It was just about having success with the product. I wanted to see it on the shop shelves in the UK. That was kind of my first goal really with the brand. Then we got into the UK. Then it was getting into other markets. Then it was kind of getting to a million pounds turnover. And it was conquering the world. So it kind of grew and grew and grew. Well, I did want to shift gears and talk about some of those highs. And not only the lows. as much as we've started with getting pulled apart on national TV and the luggage ban and then, of course, the kind of the personal...

13:20Well, I think we learn more from our failures than from the... Well, Rob, you are a perfect ambassador for strategy and magic. That's very much the purpose of the show, right? It's like to share what are the lessons learned from some of those mistakes that have happened along the way. So before we do move on to those highs, what are some of those key lessons that you can share with our listeners from those downers? Well, I think it's reframing setbacks into them being superpowers and that's where you succeed. I mean, in business, we're always talking about kind of success, creativity and momentum.

13:50But I think behind that quite often is rejection, failure and setbacks. Yeah, 100%. So really kind of understanding that on LinkedIn, quite often it's all just a bit too glossy about how successful everyone's been. Right. But behind all those successes are lots of anxiety, lots of setbacks. 100%. There is a fantastic... And actually, I'm finding you get a lot of traction now on that platform where you're really honest and open and talk about the things that haven't gone well yeah a hundred percent absolutely there's this fantastic visual you know an image is worth a thousand words and it's got if you imagine kind of three squares of dots the first square of dots are all multi-colored the middle one is just one of the colors and everything else grayed out because that's the only thing you're showing and then the last one is they're all that same color because that's all that you're showing people so that's therefore what you then kind of extrapolate out to the rest of their life you think that that is the reality and i think that's how social media has really warped our perception and especially something as tough as entrepreneurship and of course the linkedin humble bragging doesn't doesn't help with that um i do just want to connect back before we do talk about some of those highs and amazing achievements that you had i do just want to connect it back to that motivation as well that kept driving you because but when i asked you before it was like it was kind of a side thing it was a slow burner it was kind of in the back of your mind it took a long time to sort of get it to market but there must have been a point where it's like okay we're all in on this we need to kind of get that firepower how then like what was most why did you want to put all your eggs in a basket of children's suitcases um i just thought i'll give this a go uh i'll quit my job once i've got stock to sell and if it fails at least it would be an amazing mba yeah but actually i growing up I never wanted to be a business person.

15:39My dad was a businessman. He ran a retail interior design business and his company designed all the rationing shops and things. But he was a workaholic and growing up, I was like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna enjoy life. I'm gonna party hard and, and experience what the world has to offer and travel the world and did quite a bit of that. But then as soon as I found my passion, I became a workaholic. So he put me off the idea of being a business person, now entrepreneur yeah uh but then i found my passion and kind of became one your own kind of definition of that and why children's suitcases in particular like of all of the things to you know to put your time and energy and effort towards why was it especially in those earlier kind of days as well like did you have market validation in a more practical sense or was there more of this like deep belief and vision that you had for trunky well i tested the prototype out in primary school so I had quite a lot of validation there um friends and family but that I was trying to kind of not listen to that uh the mum test right before the mum test was written well more more the kind of slightly um impartial it wasn't impartial yeah exactly and then when I started when I posted about the design on these blogs and started getting inquiries that was kind of quite significant validation that I started trading internationally almost overnight So then it was like, well, let's give this a go and double down.

16:59And my mum thought I was a bit crazy to quit my job and do this. But I just thought, let's have a go. What have I got to lose? I was in my late 20s. Yeah. So there was very low risk. Yeah, exactly. You're in a stage in your life where you're able to take more of those bigger hits, right? But I mean, the funny thing was, and Trunky's now very well known, but at the time when it came to hire my first person after about six months of trading, one person applied for the job so they got it they got the job what was the role of that first hire it was kind of like an operational role um a bit of admin um a bit of everything classic startup amazing so you find product market fit eventually so you've got a bit of this like the repositioning the early market appetite, things are growing.

17:54What were your growth levers in those early days? It was all about exporting and the international trade shows I was going to was where we were really getting a lot of traction. And in a couple of these industries, it turned out that was actually the baby industry that was the best fit for us. So the kind of mother cares, the baby stores, the baby departments were mainly where we ended up. In fact, the The luggage industry had a very different margin cascades. The retailers wanted 60 % margin, whereas the baby market wanted 40%. So we could actually make it work price point wise in that market, along with toy.

18:30But luggage was always a real struggle. Yeah. How much, what causes my mind is given we're turning back the clocks around, you know, a couple of decades at this point, right? And even in your story, I've picked up on details like popping down to the newsager and flipping through the radio times and all these kinds of things, right? this is of course pre-social media this is pre like d2c e-commerce how much of the time that you were in was a help or a hindrance well actually it was um the first way i could sell trunkies was actually a custom coded e-commerce site so yes way before shopify right but i met a techie in australia and convinced him to program me an e-commerce site and he had a commission on sales Wow.

19:11So, and it was right at the start of social media, so Facebook, each Trunky had its own Facebook account. So back then we had about four or five, and then I suddenly realised this was going to be hard work to have a Facebook account per Trunky. Finary. Ended up launching about 65 different versions. So, and then it became just the one account. Wow. Such early days of it all, isn't it? It was the very early days, yeah. How much of the timing do you attribute to the success that you had? I think the timing was more around the budget airlines and low cost travel. That kind of really was the biggest lever that a lot more people were able to go off on those cheaper holidays.

19:48Yeah, that makes sense. And we're always quite a small team for the size of the persona of the brand. And I think the ability for the cases to advertise themselves in airports was probably our greatest marketing gift. Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And what would you I know I'm kind of skipping ahead a little bit because I do want to kind of chronologically, you know, finish the trunky chapter. But I know that you advise other entrepreneurs and startups these days as well. How what would I know, of course, it depends on the specifics and so many other variables. But if there were a younger Rob sat across the table from you now who's got a similar idea and he's launching his business with Meta, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, all of these social media channels that we have today that you didn't.

20:34Bearing in mind, yes, it's democratised entrepreneurship and made it so much frictionless and lowered that barrier. But of course, it has to everyone else. Right. And so it's increased the competition and the noise. So what would be your advice to that younger Rob now? Well, I think we're actually 10 years too late for the whole DTC play. Whereas like the Harry's Razors guys and the cost of advertising on Meta or Facebook was was much lower. Now it's incredibly expensive. Unless you've got a customer lifetime value to achieve, it's really not worth investing in those channels. And D2C is really challenging.

21:11What we've learned and what I also do is focus the business on Amazon. Amazon's a kind of a closed ecosystem that rewards the adverts, whereas Meta and Google don't care if your adverts convert or not. Amazon do. So you can build this flywheel effect. and Amazon is not just the UK or the US, it's Europe as well. It's the biggest marketplace in France and Germany. So Amazon can give you a great tool to be able to get heard and get sales. So it's almost seeing it as a marketing tool because the margins are quite slim. But with our new business, we're Amazon only to sort of start off with. And we had lots of success with Trunky with Amazon and kind of in the UK, it kind of built itself off the back of Dragon's Den so Dragon's Den was the best thing that happened for us it kind of catapulted us into the public psyche but in Europe it didn't and actually advertising on their platforms about not just the suitcase but our other products really really worked and actually off the back of that me and my brother founded an Amazon marketing agency yes to help brands succeed on Amazon because there is this this playbook and we've sold 12 ,000 units in our first year of our new product ZB just on Amazon in the UK just to prove product market fit.

22:30Wow okay amazing we definitely want to talk about these other ventures and yeah I guess the pearl of wisdom there as well that I'm taking away is like going to where the market is right like instead of trying to build it yourself and getting people to come to you like go to them and the other thing is like the infrastructure like not only have you got the eyeballs but the logistics the whole operational side to the business that a humongous giant you know you can kind of can help you get there all right so we're going to talk about your other ventures but closing on the Trunky journey um one of the highs I wanted to touch on was I read that you you were so successful that you managed to acquire your own factory and therefore create this like vertical supply chain operations what was that about what even gave you the idea to buy your own factory and like what's the story there well the idea wasn't to buy factory was to just reach your production because making things out in the Far East you've got an incredibly long lead time you've got to invest a huge amount of stock I mean I remember in the earlier days when we were really successful and we were like five six million pound turnover and it's great being a paper millionaire with no money in your bank account struggling to make their payroll each month and we went into the warehouse and it was just full of stock so all the cash had gone into building this massive amount of inventory because the pace of our growth like no retailer could forecast for that growth or even see it coming so we're always playing catch-up and always having to buy more more stock then the exchange rates kept fluctuating there were loads of big swings with like 2009 where the dollar massively appreciated against sterling and all of a sudden we were making no margin selling our products to the retailers there's just a real lack of control so many moving parts so I kind of really wanted to be to make Trunky closer to home.

24:19We put out a national tender and found a company who were really competitive and they basically were quoting for the same as our landed costs from China. So taking the shipping costs because we're quite a large product, there's a couple of dollars of shipping per unit and the duty and they were about the same price. So that made total sense to me to then reshore production. To achieve that price, we had to re-engineer the product. So the Chinese made Trunky had 25, no, 30 metal screws and pins that held it together. and the UK one we had to completely re-engineer it to take out all the metal so I had no metal in it at all all the parts just snap fitted together so it was much quicker to assemble it got rid of all the metal which is a bit of a safety risk for children and also helped us create 100 plastic product that was much easier to recycle so it kind of ticks lots of my goals and we started producing in down in Totnes actually originally then Plymouth the factory moved to upscale its production facility to take on our business and another brand and my pr vision was to have trunkies with the union jack rolling off the production line this is 2012 we had the london 2012 olympic so we secured a low cog license had official olympic trunkies rolling off production line and had every tv network back then it was channel 4 itv and bbc filming them roll off the production line so big tip what a result oh what a clever marketing um and then throughout that year the factory really struggled to keep up with demand.

25:44We gave them really clear forecasts. They always delivered short. There were big gaps in our production. We couldn't completely transfer everything from China to the UK. So we had this mixed message about we couldn't really shout from the rooftops about everything was made from the UK because some of it was still coming from China because they weren't able to ramp up production properly. And at the end of 2012, I was invited to a meeting in London with the factory MD and he told me they're on the brink of going into administration they completely cocked up their supply chain their ability to produce products they bit more than they could chew and were on the brink of going bust and i'd invested close to half a million pounds in this project retooling in the uk and setting up our supply chain but i'm as a product designer i'm close to manufacturing i kind of understand some of the basics and it just made total sense to me to do a pre-pack buy them out of administration save the 40 jobs and vertically integrate.

26:41Wow. So I told all my business mates and peers and they said, don't do it. What are you talking about? Of course they did. This is biting off more than you can chew. But one good piece of advice was if you do do it, hire a consultant to try and turn it around. Don't get drawn into it yourself. So we borrowed about a quarter of a million quid off the bank and acquired them out of administration. A quarter of a million was working capital to help them turn them around and then we discovered why it had gone into administration and that was a simple lesson in leadership so the night shift would just produce scrap all night because they just didn't like the people who used to run the factory so they just just been wasting money and yeah no one really likes the leaders down there they're the old owner who had done an mbo So, kind of listening to the team down there, we ended up having to move out the old owner.

27:41And to me, it was like, we've got to find what people are passionate about. What can we hang above the door to get people thrilled by and talking to everyone? It was just, they were simply proud to be making in the UK. So we put that above the door and then started turning this sinking oil tank, I'd liken it to, in the right direction. It took two years and yes, that consultant stayed there for 18 months rather than their initial six-week contract. So it was a real challenge to turn it around. But we turned it around, vertically integrated it, and then with e-commerce sales booming, we were manufacturing them in Plymouth, moving them next door to our warehouse and shipping them directly out to Mum in the UK and across Europe.

28:20So not only are you building this already wildly successful children's luggage brand, but you're also managing this turnaround of a new... Managing a turnaround manager. yeah okay yeah it was it was a huge amount of stress and strife yeah um but yeah we we kind of achieved it and then it was a great so through brexit where the sterling massively depreciated we're able to be very very competitive with our pricing yeah and then um through covid where sales dropped off a cliff literally 70 drop in sales for two years we had to go into hibernation but then when uh when people were able to travel were able to turn the taps back on we didn't have 120 daily times from China and we're able to meet that ramp up in demand very quickly.

29:04Much more control over the situation. So it did pay dividends when it came to exiting and no one wanted to touch the factory. So we had quite a bit of interest, but the factory was causing a lot of problems for people because they didn't want that responsibility. Oh, OK. Wow. I mean, it sounds like such a strength, though, to have that level of control. That's what I thought, but that's not how most businesses are structured. so no it was um it was a big challenge and in the end the acquirer um we did a deal where the operations manager of the acquirer was so impressed by the factory he quit his job there bought the factory office and that amazing it's a great turn to two different businesses again Rob what a story oh my god I had no idea and again it just goes to show these setbacks that have been completely reframed and how you've come out the other side so much better off for it I had to ask you with rewinding a sec to that moment when your friends and family were like no don't do it sounds like a terrible idea did that motivate you even further or did that kind of make you sort of look at things a bit more sensibly it was a bit like a dragon's den moment where I couldn't relate to what they were saying yeah it made total sense in my head and I accepted their challenge but it was like but it makes so much sense yeah this is clearly where like the entrepreneur gene is very different to the normies out there.

30:27I'm very glad you went ahead with it because it's, I mean, I can only imagine how incredibly stressful that whole situation was, but it sounded like you guys. A huge amount of pride to have ran a factory down there for 10 years. Yeah. Employing, we got up to about 50 people there. So the whole business was about 80 at peak. Wow. And yeah. Incredible. So you mentioned the exit and this is how I wanted to obviously wrap on the amazing Trunky story here. So you already mentioned that they weren't interested in the factory, which, again, I can't understand, but that's why I'm not in mergers and acquisitions.

30:58What was the path like to exiting? Were you looking to exit? Did someone approach you? And what were the things that surprised you most about that experience? Well, the naive initial plan was three to five year timeline. Right. And it was 18 years before we exited. but we were we were we got private equity backing in 2013 so we invest we raised four million pounds to really help kind of grow the business and then the exit horizon was again three to five years so we were talking to a lot of people over the over a period of time but it was never quite right and then covid hit we had two years of a huge challenge to get through we just survived and after that it was like uh you know i've sold five million suitcases around the world we're in 100 countries it's done really well in some markets you know i was struggling to see what i could do next yeah that makes sense with the brand and after 18 years it felt like the right time to try something new yeah and how poetic as well that it was like 18 years right it's almost like that coming of age like time to leave home and what surprised you about the experience of selling your business?

32:08Well, we ran a competitive tender, which is always helpful, drove price. I then had to sign into an earn out. And it was, so many people tell me the earn out is, is you're going to struggle to make it the whole way. How long was it for you? Well, I had a two year earn out and I lasted 18 months. So yeah, I thought, no, I'll go in with this with eyes wide open yeah I'll be very meanable and adaptable and I'll try and make it work and I did but the chaos that ensued with our integration was just mind-blowing so it was it was a really challenging integration and where my job description literally been integrate your business into our team their team just didn't have a clue what they were doing with regards to doing anything outside of Amazon so it then became a full-blown general manager role.

33:06How did that affect you having sold your business you kind of passed over those reins but you're still involved so you've still got that sense of ownership you've still got that pride that connection but you're no longer running the show? Well it was challenging because you knew what you needed to do and you would just do it but you couldn't just do it you had to write a business plan to get it approved and then even writing a business plan they couldn't decide necessarily whether to approve it or not so it was just like banging your head against the wall so after 18 months it was time to give the head a break and oh rob that sounds so frustrating but i did i did learn a couple of things when i was there they were very very much a techie business trying to get tech to do absolutely everything right uh which caused a lot of the challenges but um they're really embracing ai so that kind of opened my eyes a bit to that along with my brother's use of it so I started really learning about how to use it so that was one big learning and then the other one was I couldn't believe this this company at Aquadas are called an Amazon aggregator which basically means they were looking to buy successful brands on Amazon put them into their back end and get operational efficiencies which they're really good at but they wanted to buy Trunkey because we could take them off Amazon and get them into DTC retail and distribution.

34:26Yeah. But I was amazed being a product designer and thinking you always have to reinvent the wheel. Some of the products that anyone could buy from a factory in China that had no innovation were doing phenomenal numbers just because of the Amazon flywheel effect. So really opened my eyes to you don't actually have to reinvent the wheel. So with my new business ZB, we thought actually let's take an OEM product from a factory, make a few small changes, but really reposition those changes as massive benefits. Yeah. Plug it into the Amazon system. And plug it into Amazon. Right. That's been phenomenal.

35:01And we've been able to create a brand, do product market tests for about£50 ,000. Wow. Wow. That's insane. Much more effective than what you get today with meta ads, as we were saying before. Just to wrap the final question, well, two final questions on the exit subject. One is, what would you do differently? Would you negotiate just like a shorter earn out period or look more stringently at the future acquirers? Like hindsight's a wonderful thing. So what would you do differently now? I don't know. There was so much smoke about what they could do. I don't know if you'd be able to see through it.

35:34I mean, I'm always asked, what would you do differently? But I think you learn so much from things not working that who knows what mistakes you might make in the future. So I'm very much of the mindset of just go with it, learn from it and move on. Clearly you have enough resilience to just like pick yourself back up and keep going. I mean, partly it's a shame that some of the most of the team didn't get to stick around after a period of time, which was always the case. However, they've all gone on to do bigger and better things. so yeah exactly the other question i did want to ask you just related to the exit is how has that affected you as a founder in terms of like emotionally your identity because i know other amazing entrepreneurs who have exited and they kind of like oh what do i do now yeah it's the classic question when you're whatever it might be an event at dinner party or or being interviewed just like what do you do and my answer is uh what do i do now so i played with a few different things um so uh yeah i'm still struggling to answer that although i'm really getting into one of my new businesses so that's probably where i'm going to be focusing a lot more my time but after exiting i actually timed it perfectly my last day at the job as being general manager was the day i got a pair of house keys so I was then able to transition quite seamlessly into a year of renovating a house and playing with power tools and using my hands again not being in Excel so that was that was great and that gave me a lot of time to think and reflect but yeah having a bit of a portfolio career with running part running a marketing agency with my brother doing a lot of inspirational business speaking and keynotes running my new business cp doing a lot of diy it's kind of like these different hats how do i sum that up in a clear and concise sentence and not even in terms of you know your your byline as it were but i guess more just just your identity like the inner psyche of like oh i'm now no longer the founder and ceo of trunky as you were for the best part of two decades right yeah but i guess because of the brand uh and the success it had and the awareness it's got it's kind of that's kind of done and proven and kind of feel like i've achieved all i could there so that's very healthy but actually the other job i've got i've got three young kids so being a very present father no i think some people would be surprised to learn that actually the fact that you didn't don't correct me if i'm wrong as well on this you started trunky before you had any kids you mentioned you were super young so i feel like there's this image um it's not explicit but you know being being this kind of guy having this children's luggage brand is like oh maybe it was for his kids or you know maybe kids gave him an idea but of course well actually it probably was a bit of a surrogate child because another side effect of cf is infertility for mainly men so i grew up thinking i wouldn't be able to be a father so they were your kids so trunky was my first baby and that that probably was what drew me to doing something in that space i'm a big kid at heart i really like kids yeah um but actually there was um a question i was asked halfway through my trunky journey by my business coach and it's kind of rob why are you doing this and i could explain why from a business point of view about the mission vision values yeah but she really kept pressing me on why personally am i doing this yeah i'm running so hard in business and just trying to achieve achieve achieve and use all this energy and drive against the tragedy of losing my sister i kind of lost sight of what why I was doing this personally what was I trying to achieve exactly where was I trying to get to so she really forced me to kind of reflect a bit which I wasn't very good at I was always looking forward and never looking back yeah and it suddenly occurred to me that I did want to start a family and that then I started putting strategies in place like doing the fundraiser the private ex-you guys to get some grey hair so I wouldn't have to carry all the responsibility on my shoulders um and ended up uh working part-time in the business just three days a week and having some amazing time with my now three kids yeah oh that's so cute congratulations on the kids and that makes perfect sense yeah this is kind of what i'm really glad that we could peel away some of those layers of the onion as it were to get deeper on you know why you know it is it is tough to build a business let alone all these setbacks that you've had so that makes a lot more sense now as to kind of what keeps driving you to do these fun, really children's suitcases.

40:04We've spent most of the time obviously talking about Trunky. You've told us a little bit about ZP. I know you've got another business as well. So do you want to share the elevator pitch on the children's sleep product that you're also working on? Yeah, sure. So ZP was born out of, well, during COVID, I got really into sleep health. Trunky sales had massively dropped. We kind of had to go into hibernation. So after we kind of did all the financial negotiations with everyone we owed money to, it was then kind of learning, I was then really passionate about learning about sleep health. I had three young kids at the time who keep me up a lot, but also looking at the products in the market.

40:41And there's a market leader, which is called a grow clock that kind of tells kids with color and stars when to get out of bed. But the latest sleep science was saying blue light was bad and this thing is blue at night and very bright. And me and my brother were talking about this kind of market opportunity, but also if we did a product, I was very keen to try and merge technology and media in some sort of way. And rather than having a reading book, we felt there was an opportunity to do a podcast. But I'm dyslexic. I've got no idea how to create content that can really be consumed. But then we started leaning into AI and that became a superpower and it opened up a whole world to content I could create using AI to sense check everything.

41:27And it became really incredible that we could kind of ask AI, OK, we want to create a really, you understand the latest child psychology. Now, how can we feed that into creating a really meditative, calming bedtime story? So the ability to craft all these things into something was just phenomenal. and we created an incredible story that seemed to work we couldn't use ai narration at the time because it wasn't quite there so we used a human narrator um who was just amazing and created these incredible podcast stories that are actually sending the parents to sleep as well as the kids yeah i can imagine faster than the kids and we just thought we'll give that a go we did a sleep guide for parents so rather than just having a physical product we wanted to educate parents get kids in the right mindset for sleep and then have a product to help guide them when it was time to sleep and wake up so that all started working and the podcast has actually become a real success we had a thousand downloads last week and then leaning into AI again it's like well let's see what AI narration can do now and it still can't quite do the story narrative but one of the platforms can actually dub your content so we started playing around with translations and And yeah, the dubbing content actually keeps the pacing and the soundtrack and keeps everything aligned.

42:45And we can now launch our podcast in French, German, Spanish, Italian. So we've now launched ZB Somolier, which is the French version. And we'll be launching German. International success again. So what have you brought from your Trunky experience to finding product market fit and growing this new business? I think the big learning from Trunky was around understanding we had two customers. We had a parent and a child. parents wanted the function utility but child children really want to make friends with their products i mean there's stories we have kids taking their trunkies to bed and stuff like that so it's like very important for zb to have a clear personality something the kids could really relate to so we've got a cat initially a cat and the sloth clock and then the cat and the sloth characters in our podcast story that you go on uh journeys with um so really kind of understanding those two has been really useful um and yeah that that personality aspect so it's amazing how how it is missing from so many products in the market yeah amazing so you've identified a gap in the market you've come with this good idea put it to the test leveraging ai and advanced technologies to be able to kind of you know tinker with the product and then kind of get out there and see how people react to it yeah are you doing anything to push it what are the channels that are working for you?