How Deux's Mastery Of Social Media Vaulted It Into The Big Time

25:49And so that, you know, you'll see that. Then we say, okay, we need to do a paid partnership with this person. They love the product. Their audience is meant for us. Like we should do something there. So they'll graduate to paid. And that audience, we'll do between three and five paid influencers a month about right now. And we'll scale that probably as we grow. And then the ultimate partnership with our influencers is if we do a collab flavor with them. And we don't do it often. We probably did a little too many this year. We did a lot of collabs. We were a little collab heavy. But that's when we know the audience is a fit.

26:22You know, we want to build content with them. We want a deeper relationship. You know, I'll probably if they have a podcast, I'll go on their podcast. So that's kind of the ultimate relationship of actually building a collab flavor that's authentic to them. You also got to watch out for influencers who are, I'll just say, jerks. Yeah, we have a we have a no jerk policy. That's, that's, um, but it's hard because you, you know, sometimes there'll be someone who really converts and like seemingly authentic to their audience. And then you'll get behind the scenes and kind of peel the onion back. And you're like, oh shit, I don't necessarily want to work with you or get in bed with you.

26:59So yeah, it's hard. And it's hard to kind of like turn those people down as well, because, you know, in theory, they make a great partnership, but I am really involved in that process. And the reason it's interesting, because I don't know that a lot of founders are super involved in marketing per se. Like a lot of founders are maybe product people. They created the product and they really kind of focus on that. I come from a brand team at PepsiCo's and brand management. So I care a lot about our marketing and I'm a marketer by nature. So if they're getting to the level of being a paid partner, I've probably had a conversation with them.

27:36if they're getting to the level of a collab, then we've had many conversations. And so I kind of have that personal relationship there, which, you know, it helps. And it also, it makes it more human because I think the reason they're jerks sometimes, and not to defend all influencers, but I think the reason they're jerks sometimes is also because they have such transactional relationships, specifically with brands. Brands get mad when you don't, you know, post or they'll make you redo a video seven times, even though it's probably fine. Like sometimes brands are also jerks to influencers. And so our deepest relationship is with the skinny confidential with Lauren and Michael and, you know, they're investors in the brand personally, they're investors through dear media.

28:17And then we also have really big collab flavors that we do with Lauren. And, you know, I've had many conversations with her in person, on the phone, on zoom, on email. And when we got in bed, it was, it was fully vetted because I was so involved in it, but now the relationship is so deep because it's so fully vetted that, But she'll do us favors. I'll do her favors. We really want each other to win. And those are the best relationships. I think once you treat it transactionally, I think you can both ways. You can kind of piss people off. You can piss the brand off. You can piss the influencer off.

28:50I'm going to ask you a question. That's a general question, but you might have a more specific answer. I'm not going to ask you for specifics, but I think you can see where I'm going with this. For someone that is listening and says, okay, well, I want to dedicate a certain part of my marketing budget to paid influencers? What percentage should that be? That's a good question. One, I would say influencers don't work for everyone. Supplement brands, definitely. Every influencer is hawking a supplement. So there are brands that work really well for that. There are some brands that are just not made for influencers.

29:23So one, I would say, figure that out if your brand is. And you can do that just by even seeding and seeing the reception. Typically, if it's a difficult product, if you have to like make it or if it's an ingredient that like that's a little bit more difficult for influencers. The reason our product, our products get ready to eat. It's very, you know, you can bake it in eight minutes. So it's a little bit easier. But I would say of our marketing budget, we spend about a third of it on seeding paid partnerships. And that includes the revenue or the commission that comes from a collab product. So all of that together, we spend about a third of it on that.

30:04And then our ROAs, so for DTC brands, return has been for all other brands, just your ROI, our marketing ROI on paid has to be above a Forex. So that includes influencers. Now, influencers are tricky because again, this is getting a little bit in the weeds here, but we're pretty analytical with how we do it. They might only return you like a 2x return on ad spend, but you're not counting all of the retargeting that comes from their first exposure. Because the classic marketing rule of seven is you have to see something seven times before you actually buy it. So there will be a ton of people who buy it immediately when the influencer says, but then you have the, I would say, three to six weeks after where you're retargeting them on meta and they're actually buying because they first saw it on that influencers page.

30:49So we go for a blended Forex, but that's where the budget I think matters less. It matters if you're actually getting an ROI from it. And I've seen brands that just like spend, spend, spend on influencers and they just don't, they don't do anything. So I think that's what you have to keep track of. Are you managing the accounting of your social media spend internally or is that something you outsource? So we manage it internally. We work with propeller, the D to C thing, starting D to C really helps because you're so analytical and mathematical about how you spend. And you quite literally one day, if you overspend and your return on ad spend is lower than your bogey, then the next day you pull it back.

31:31We have an agency that does the ad buying, but we manage that internally. Again, all this works only if people pay attention to the content that you're producing. And then going back to my point about how damn good you guys are at social media and the proof is in the pudding, 91 ,000 followers on Instagram, 30 ,000 followers on TikTok. We talked about this last time we spoke about how social media content for dough is a collaborative process. How is it collaborative? How does it work across your team and, you know, what is your specific role in content creation? Yeah, I know. I have a lot of, I have a lot of friends who are like, can I just hire like a 19 year old person to like take over my TikTok?

32:21Other brands do it. Yeah. And sometimes it works. Like it's, you know, sometimes it works. I don't know about for us if that would necessarily work, but that was the mindset too. Even when I was at Frito-Lay, I was the first, you know, the youngest person on the team when I joined. And so I just automatically like they were like, here's back at the time it was it was revolutionary for a brand to have a Facebook account. So like, here, can you please make us a Facebook and tweet on Twitter for us? And I was like, Okay, I don't have. But okay. So it's often ours, ours is collaborative in that we have, you know, planning meetings where we are they're kind of mind melds.

32:57And you know, not only is it the marketing team, but our ops team is pretty, it's kind of interesting. It's not a typical ops team. They also have the mindset of like, how can we spin this or how can we use this for marketing? That's why the sprinkles thing happened, right? And we had this kind of a similar situation with our oopsie oatmeal product last year where we bought the wrong mesh size of oat flour, like just slightly the wrong mesh size, and it made more of an oatmeal texture. And so our ops team, if there's a mess up or if there's something, there's an opportunity, they will sometimes crack the joke of like, well, can marketing make anything of it?

33:33And usually the answer is yes. So it's a little, it's collaborative in that sense. But then as well, I kind of take a role and I haven't done this in a minute. So I need to, I usually have time blocked on my calendar every week to film TikToks and to film content. And I am not a front facing founder by choice. I don't love it. I didn't set out to do that. I'm I'm very private actually, but now I do it because not only is it good for the business and it does well on social platforms, but it also builds this connection that you're just unable to build with a brand without a human persona. And so now I've, you know, I've sucked it up and gotten used to it.

34:12And I can, I can actually, I'm very good at actually filming TikToks now, which at my age is a feat, but that, that piece of telling the founder story, even like, you know, after Shark Tank, you know, telling that story of what happened and, you know, the, the sprinkle story, all of that, it really does build that connection and people want to know the founder. So I, I am pretty active about my role in creating content with the team. Yeah. I mean, you are front and center. I think every third post that I see on, on your Instagram account, it features you on your website. You know, if you open it, if you go to eat dough.com and for folks who don't know how to spell dough at this point, minus D-E-U-X.

34:51If you go right on your homepage in the lower right-hand corner, you pop up. It's a small, short video. It's a tie from our founder. How do you get over, I guess, the privateness or the introverted part of you to become this face of the brand? Yeah. Well, when I filmed Shark Tank, it was like six months after we launched. They reached out in three months after we launched. And then I filmed three months later. When I filmed, I kind of had it in my head of like, okay, you're going to be on national television. You kind of have, well, actually you have a 50 % chance of being on national television.

35:29Fun fact, not all of Shark Tank. If you film Shark Tank, you don't necessarily air. 50 % of brands actually air, but you have a chance of being on television. You have a decision to make. Either you can, you know, go public on Instagram, you know, start doing interviews. Like this is the start of a PR machine. or you can say private, you know, the brand is forward. And early on when I launched, I did, I remember doing interviews and people, people would ask me about like my morning routine or like, you know, what products I liked and I would recommend. And I always thought that was so weird. I was like, why do you care?

36:05It's not about like, don't you want to talk about the business? You became a forced influencer. Yeah, exactly. I was kind of like co-heirs, yeah, voluntold into being an influencer, but I would get those questions and I was like, okay, that's interesting. And whenever I would do one of those interviews or podcasts, people would, we saw spike in sales and people were very interested in the person behind the brand. And so when I was making that decision about Shark Tank, it was like, okay, I know that this is probably good for the brand. So, you know, you basically, it's a fork in the road, either you do it or you don't.

36:35And I decided to do it. And I am still, I mean, you've met my husband, he's, he's pretty private as well. So I'm still pretty private about, about the things I want to be private about, but when it comes to, you know, doing the Today Show or Good Morning America or Shark Tank or this, like it helps in sharing your experiences. It helps in telling the brand story. But then it also, I think I'm probably a little bit more real with our wins and our losses and maybe like how difficult it is to be a founder when I talk about it. And so I think that also, I've had a lot of founder outreach from that, you know, saying like, thank you for being honest.

37:11So I think that knowing that it helps people too, that kind of keeps me going and not just wanting to like cocoon and say, you know, in my house in LA. How much does copy matter in these posts? I see this all the time where people are still using hashtags and so on and so forth. I mean, how much of that really matters? Yeah, we don't necessarily believe in the hashtag, but copy matters a lot for us. So that's really where we get our sense of humor across. So if you've ever been on our email list, Or if you can just go through our TikTok and our Instagram, that's usually what people respond the best to.

37:47And being funny is first and foremost in our brand personality. And you get that across with words. So yeah, it matters a lot. And everyone on the team could probably write a dough caption. Like they know how to embody it. And our snack break, which is our sub stack, which is kind of completely separate from Doe, that is written in a very colloquial, but very witty, quick, funny voice. So yeah, when you join the Doe team, you kind of have to learn that voice a little bit. So from what I'm hearing is that engagement really comes from the copy and being funny in your posts more than the video or the image itself.

38:29You don't need a high production value. I think that's the misconception. is like, I can't do video because it has to be shot perfectly. And it's like, that's not actually it. People care about what the content is in the video. I mean, our most viral video on TikTok has maybe seven and a half million views now. It's grainy. It's kind of grainy and like bad quality. And it didn't matter. It was the story that we were telling over the video. That's the one where you almost lost$30 ,000. Yeah. Because of the messed up formulation or what was it? The flower you used was - Oh, flower, yeah. The mesh size was slightly too, they're like a speck, they're slightly too large.

39:08Yeah. Just quickly going back to influencers, when you have a paid partnership with an influencer, are you prescriptive about the content that you want to see? Or do you sort of leave it to them to create that content? Not at all. So we find that the less prescriptive we are, the better the content. And that actually is the same when we do our collab flavors. the less involved the contract, the more the both of us just crumple it up and put it in a drawer and have, and we create magic. Like we're not just going back to the contract being like you were supposed to do this, or you're supposed to say this, or you're supposed to post this.

39:43So we try to keep it super hands-off with our influencers. One post that I noticed from May 8th of this year that really stood out to me was about Whole Foods and you were encouraging your followers to clear out the shelves on Whole Foods. It said urgent, there's a photo, there's a slide of photos here, but the first one says urgent, clear out the shelves. And on the sixth slide, it asks your audience to help out. And they ask you to clear out the shelves if you live in a certain area in the Southern Pacific region of Whole Foods. And if you don't, to call Whole Foods. And I'll put the number here and it says 1-844-WFM-TALK, Whole Foods Market Talk.

40:26And request dough in your local Whole Foods Market. We swear this actually works. Does it? It actually works. So I won't spill the beans too much because I don't know when this comes out. But yeah, it actually works. Okay. Read between the lines. I know, I won't spill the beans, but I'm going to spill the beans. It's funny. We had an investor, Animal Capital is an investor of ours. And Marshall, who is a partner there, he called and he said, the woman said, they have gotten so many calls for Joe today. And they were like, what is happening? Like, why is everybody calling? And he was like, I don't know, but I just wanted to put in a request.

41:06And so it does work. And it did actually, we had our highest velocities ever. The reason we did that is because we were leading up to a review. So we actually sent an email with the same call to action. And again, like no brand, no like normal brand would tell their consumers we're up for review at Whole Foods, like an internal thing to tell a consumer. And we're like, what if we just told them the truth? Like we're up for review. Our velocity have been growing, but we want to just like clean out out of stock where their Whole Foods is like, what the hell just happened? So what if we just told them?

41:40And we told them and they did it. I mean, you could probably tell by the engagement in that post. People called, people went and bought. They were telling their, you can see the comments. People are like, I called my aunt's cousin in LA and told her to go to the one in West Hollywood. So that was actually a pretty fun campaign and Whole Foods loved it. Yeah, a ton of engagement, thousands of likes. But one of the things that really stands out for me on that sixth slide is that you gave the posts, you gave that slide a voice. At the very end, it says, I don't wanna hear about your phone anxiety.

42:14again, then you list the number. It's like this post is talking to me. It's like, I have, it feels like I already have a relationship to the person. It feels like we're having a conversation here. And I was, it's really effective. Yeah. Everyone has phone anxiety. First of all, I think COVID made everybody, nobody, everybody just whacks and texts. Like nobody will just pick up the phone anymore, except for Christina, my head of ops. Who's just, I love her. She just picks up the phone, but yeah, we, we knew we were like, that's what's the excuse of what people will say, why they wouldn't, or like why people wouldn't do it, break that barrier for them.

42:45So if you break the barrier, they're like, now I'll call. Sabina, earlier in our conversation, you said you did too many collabs this year. You've done quite a few and they're all brilliant. I mean, everything that I've seen is fantastic. But how do you determine the right fit for a collab? Is it similar to that of an influencer? Is it similar to your influencer strategy? Yeah, similar to that. But we also, we've been doing a bit more with brands specifically, which is kind of interesting. So sometimes it's just testing. Like we did a Summer Fridays collab. If you don't know, Summer Fridays is a very big beauty brand sold in Sephora, but founded by two influencers.

43:21And it's got a cult following. And we were launching the first ever beauty cookie dough. And we didn't know that that would work. That was more so intuition, knowing our consumers really love that brand. So that was a test in doing it. But yeah, it's pretty similar in how we vet our influencers. We also sometimes look at basket analysis. So we don't get a ton of that data, but we do get if you are, and this is not a plug, but if you subscribe to Erwan's dashboard, you get access to a basket analysis and you can see what other brands are in your basket. So you actually get even more of a sense of where there's overlap or, you know, close sentiment.

43:59So like Chamberlain Coffee is one that we knew that there was this overlap. That's the cinnamon sugar donuts that you have. And that product obviously tastes amazing. But we knew from both in-store and the internet that that collab would work well. What did the internet tell you about it? So we do these stories where we ask questions of, you know, like, who should we collab with next? Or like, what brands? And we had talked about our donuts. And if you look at the responses, the number of consumers of our 90 ,000 followers saying Chamberlain was completely overindexed. And then when you look at our audience being, I would say, ranges from young Gen Z, so maybe in college, all the way to the millennial mom now.

44:43We've kind of expanded that. It used to skew a little bit younger. That audience, I mean, Emma Chamberlain, again and again and again and again. is their number one celebrity, right? Even over, like she's a YouTuber and an influencer, but even over, you know, like a typical celebrity, if you will, like a, you know, a Britney Spears. I'm so old, I'm saying Britney Spears. Like Selena Gomez, a typical celebrity like that, that that's who they resonate with. So we knew that that, because of that age range too, that would be a strong overlap. Sabina, I've really enjoyed every second of our conversation.

45:17I don't want to take up too, too much of your time, but I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you about your three lines of products, your three product lines. You have your dough, cookie dough, you have your drips, which are described on your website, not as drips, but they're described as dessert spreads, I believe. And then your donut holes. How do you prioritize or do you try to prioritize one or the other? I mean, how much of this is, you know, we want to give each one equal do, but you know, one is outselling the other by, you know, 50%. So, you know, how do you think about prioritizing, you know, each one?

45:48Yeah, it's hard because the cookie dough is like 80 % of our business right now. Maybe closer to 70 % of our business now. And then our drip line is really strong in food service. Our Better for You Nutella, we sell at Smoothie King. So it's in 1400 Smoothie King locations and it's used as a topping. So it's very strong cash wise. And then the donuts product is the one that's been, I would call it like the hottest. So I don't want to say that it's, you know, our new hero product. But if I had to put money on it in 18 months, I would say that that product will be, you know, even bigger. Part of it's because of the channel strategy.

46:24So you can put that little donuts product in convenience, you can drop it in 7-Eleven, but you can also make, you know, a big bag and sell it at Costco. So it's just, it's a little more channel agnostic. Whereas the cookie dough is more gross. It does really well at Whole Foods. It does really well at Sprouts. It does well at Target. So it's more of like when you're shopping for groceries. It's an at-home, take-home eating occasion. And then our drip, the nut butter set scares me a little bit in the grocery store. I call it the wild, wild west. We're working on a unique packaging that could potentially make it stand out in that set.

46:55Because I think if you just got a normal jar, it's just very hard to win there. So we have this unique packaging we're working on, but that's become our food service product where it's used as a topping on frozen yogurt, on smoothies. So that's been the focus there and the delineation between the three and the different channels. How much does the retailer inform you about, you know, ways that you can be innovative in merchandising and placement of these products? Because again, on D2C, you can be very specific and show the product in its best light in center store, in a cooler. It's not as easy, even though you do have great branding and great packaging, you know, it's still pretty easy to be overlooked.

47:34Yeah, no, it's hard. I mean, those off shelf displays. So our head of sales who started recently came from Clio, which is another refrigerated snacking brand. And she is the queen of figuring out how to get off shelf displays. And that the flavor innovation that we do, because we do we have I mean, you go to our website, we have s'mores, we have, you know, Texas sheet cake, we have pretty interesting, almost like Jenny's, like pretty interesting flavors, that allows us to get that off shelf in the cooler. So we launched s'mores with sprouts as an in and out over the summer. And we were in a display for the entire summer.

48:08And so that sort of it's almost like how do you finagle there's limited cooler space, how do you finagle your way into the limited shelf space there is the other thing we've been working on is how to have, you know, center store gets all the cool displays, they get the Super Bowl, like, you know, all of the beverages get to make a big football for February, the Super Bowl, we don't get that. So how do you create that same, not same, but similar kind of experience off shelf and actually have some sort of like collateral or shopper marketing or something that can tell more about the brand? So, yeah, it is hard.

48:41Retail is a while, while less. Demos have been, we slowed down a little bit, but we used to do 50 demos a month. And so that helped in getting our brand ambassadors out there and actually getting people to try and taste the product. I promise this is my last question because I know how busy you are. No, good. You know, again, going back to your packaging, this is something, you know, we touched on throughout the conversation. Your packaging is great. Your branding has to be great, you know, for that consumer to recognize it and be interested in even learning more about it. In every package, I believe in every label you have vegan and gluten-free as two keywords on that front pack.

49:16And this has been consistent, I think, since the beginning of the brand. How much impact do those keywords or terms have on a consumer's decision to buy the product? and also a retailer's decision to bring it into their stores. Yeah, so funny, we're transitioning into packaging, which we're producing in in January, that actually changes the hierarchy a bit. And we don't say vegan anymore, we say dairy-free. I had this hunch about vegan, and I don't remember what it was. It must've been like something I was listening to or like a podcast or something. And I was like, vegan, is that off? Like my Texas self, my old Texas self is thinking, is that off-putting to people?

49:52Do people think vegan things taste like shit? and I asked the, I texted our group chat and I was like, can we run a survey on this? Like, can we figure out what people, so we did on stories and we got a ton of engagement and opinions on it. And lo and behold, people think vegan tastes like shit. So at least our consumer does. So we need to change that to dairy free because most of the time when people are eating vegan, they're not necessarily, maybe in LA it's different, but the rest of the country, it's because they're avoiding dairy because of whatever reason. And then gluten-free is very important to the consumer, especially people, even if they have a little bit of sensitivity, to try to eat gluten-free.

50:24So those two are actually smaller on our new packaging. And the biggest call out is the percent less sugar. So it's, you know, that donuts that you're holding is 40 % less sugar. And that's the biggest call out now. Sugar and protein matter the most, maybe different for other consumers, but for our consumer, sugar and protein matter the most. And then vegan and gluten-free are important for those who need that. And it gives a little bit of the help halo, but don't need to be as big as the other. So that's, we're actually rejiggering it a little bit. Good to know. I'm glad I asked. We are way over time, but I feel like we could keep going on for like another hour or two.

50:59So perhaps we'll have a part two of this in 2024. Oh, I love it. Sabina, thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for taking the time to sit down with me. So much incredible, relevant information that you share with our audience. I know they're grateful as am I. Thank you. Of course. Thank you for the thoughtful questions. I appreciate it. that brings us to the end of this episode of taste radio thank you so much for listening taste radio is a production of bevnet.com incorporated our audio engineer for taste radio is joe cratchy our technical director is joshua pratt and our video editor is ryan galang our social marketing manager is amanda smerlinski and our designer is amanda huang just a reminder if you like what you hear on taste radio please share the podcast with friends and colleagues and of course we would love it if you could review us on the apple podcast app or your listening platform of choice check us out on instagram our handle is bevnet taste radio as always for questions comments ideas for future podcasts please send us an email to ask at taste radio.com on behalf of the entire taste radio team thank you for listening and we'll talk to you next time

52:16Thank you.