Form shopify startup to Walmart shelves: building a category leader.

0:00The three of us had no background in dentistry. We saw there was going to be a big dental convention in Chicago. That one event really gave us clarity on what we needed to do to help people who grind their teeth and produce custom nightguards for cheaper. So we started off as a Shopify brand. Now we are the largest custom nightguard company in the U.S. Welcome to the DTC Insider Podcast, where online business owners come to find actionable tips and tactics to grow their businesses. Now, here's your host, Brian Roizenthal.

0:43I am joined by Samuel Goodman, co-founder of Jiki. Hey, Samuel, thanks for being on the show. yeah well it's great to be here brian thanks for having me excited for our chat and yeah i mean you built an amazing brand that we are going to talk about in a minute and you have done what many founders are looking to doing with whenever they found the brand which is you know going into walmart target and of course having an online process so i'm sure that this episode will be backed with value, no pressure at all. But why don't we start with your background? How long did you start, you know, cheeky and what were you doing before doing that?

1:29Yeah, so I was in college. I was a senior about to graduate. And one of my best friends who I was living with came up to me and he said, you know, I grind my teeth at night. I just purchased a really expensive night guard from my dentist. Only problem is I lost it. Insurance doesn't cover it. So really my only option now is to either buy a new guard at full price or go like to CVS or one of the pharmacies and buy a one size fits all guard that really doesn't work as well. It's bulky and just long-term won't help the situation. So he came to me and his other twin brother, the three of us were living together.

2:08And he said, you know, we should research this and see if there's a way to, you know, help people who grind their teeth and produce custom nightguards for cheaper using the same dentist quality materials. So we decided to do some research. We, the three of us had no background in dentistry. I'm an e-com major. They were both marketing majors. But after doing some research, we found the space to be super interesting. And we saw there was going to be a big dental convention in Chicago. We decided to just fly down there and go check out the latest tech and equipment and meet people. So we were these three college students among dentists and really senior people at some of these dental brands, just walking around trying to figure out what each machine was and the best way to make these night guards.

2:58We ended up finding out that PD printing was the latest technology and we'd be able to manufacture these guards super cheap if we had the right PD printer. So we pulled our savings together and ended up buying a small 3d printer and the summer just messing around with it, use it and trying to figure out the best way to actually print these. That's really like the story of how we started Cheeky and definitely been a long ride. That's a great story and I assume it must have been intimidating to go to that event full of experts, as you said, in the dental industry and you three knowing little to nothing about the industry.

3:40How did you three, you know, both of you, how did you feel back then?

3:48Yeah, it definitely was an experience for us. You know, we went just pretending that we had this company and like we had nothing at the time and just being like, hey, we're looking to do this and that and trying to make it seem like we knew what we were talking about even though to be honest looking back we had no clue but that one event or i would say weekend in chicago really gave us clarity on what we needed to do to bring this to life we ended up finding a printer we found a 3d scanner which is what we'd need to scan the impressions that people take to get the custom mold so that's where we got like our foundation of the technology we would use and our next step really was to speak to potential customers and see if this is would be something they're interested in so we built a landing page we spend a few bucks a day on google ads trying to collect phone numbers and emails of potential teeth grinders and we did hundreds of calls you know every day for a month and just tried to understand what the pinpoints were for these people and really what they wanted and that's when we said okay this is a viable idea cheeky will really help you know millions of people across the U.S.

4:59And once we had all that data, we got together and set up our, you know, dental lab and just started really sending out our first impression kits. So it wasn't an e-commerce store right off the bat. It was more of a, you know, building like a sort of a pipeline, but with the intention of learning more about your potential customers' pain points. yeah i would say the first like customers were friends and family we wanted to test the product make sure it was good then we set up our shopify store and the people who we had spoken to you know we gave them the link and they were our first beta testers and users and they helped us really perfect the product and were willing to work with us to tell us hey maybe this doesn't fit on this side or this is too thick too thin and that's how we worked with those initial customers to really perfect our product and then start scaling on Shopify, obviously through Google Ads.

6:00Yeah, because, you know, I mean, there's no right and wrong. There are as many playbooks as people on the planet, but this is great. And actually, I think that most people that I spoke with, you know, that I've spoken with over the years that started a brand at some point, they all started by, you know, creating know, Shopify store, run some ads and, you know, trying to expect, you know, you know, conversions, traffic, you know, everything. But you approach it in a different way. You set up landing pages for us, I understood. And actually the main objective was to get insights from customers before and get on the call with them to understand their pain points and then build up from there.

6:44So that's clever.

6:49Yeah, that was, we thought like if we're building this for the customer and we have no experience in dentistry, the only way this is going to work is if we actually spend time speaking to them, learning from them, working with them and making sure our product aligns with what they need. And we can remove the friction of going to the dentist, the price barrier, and just make it something also fun that they enjoy to get every three months because we started as a subscription service, you know, nightguards get gross and dirty. they get bacteria so our whole point was we'll send you a new one for free every three months if you sign up to our subscription plan so you pay once a year and every three months you get a new night guard and the beauty of this is that you only need to take an impression once because once we 3d scan your impression we can store that into the cloud and unless you get dental work or you have any changes you won't need to retake your impressions and we could just keep shipping you a product without you having to leave your house or really do anything i use them at night really and yeah i get what you mean that they grow over time and you need to find a replacement but then where you find it so yeah i can really see the pain point firsthand how you solve it with a subscription is really smart so again please take me back in time like this is still pre-pandemic, right?

8:16This was pre-pandemic. So we launched the business in September of 2018. That's when we went online and started testing with different ads. We had no experience using Meta or Google. We didn't have an agency at the time. We were fully bootstrapped, just scraping together what we could. And we were just making these static ads on Canva, different other platforms, and just pushing them to meta. What I can say though, from my memory of that time is that customer acquisition cost was much lower. So even though we didn't have the best creative at the time, it still worked and we were able to gain traction and bring customers in.

8:56We were also the first company in the space to do custom nightguards at home on a subscription service. So I think that helped. This is a sixth season of a podcast and over the years we've been discussing with a lot of, you know, brand founders, operators, and experts in the space. And with some of them, we discussed, you know, at length, the evolution of e-commerce. And to your point, pre-pandemic and even more, I could say 2018, to be more accurate, as you said, it was a money-making machine. You know, Meta was a money-making machine. You put$1 in and you got, I don't know if$10, but more or less$5,$10 out easily with really ugly ads.

9:37Everyone talks about ugly ads, but back then apps weren't even a priority. Even for media buyers, they were just something that nobody looked at and everything worked. But then in exchange after 2021 with the tracking issues, iOS 14 and all this stuff. So going, you know, moving forward now in time, I can sense that the first thing that you developed was the online store before going into retail, right? Yeah, so we started off as a Shopify brand. We built that up, you know, started serving thousands of customers, and now we are the largest, I would say, night guard, custom night guard company in the U.S., providing direct-to-consumer services.

10:25I would say since 2018, we also expanded into other product lines, such as custom retainers, sports guards. We launched our LED whitening kit, our water floss, our toothbrush. And most recently, we just launched our mouth tape product. We also have a collagen option for females. And we just launched our SnoreGuard, which is used for sleep apnea as well. These are all online products. And it wasn't until really 2024 that we were able to get our first meeting with Walmart and really start to talk about how this is going to look like in retail. And do we even have the capabilities to fulfill for such a big box retailer?

11:09Before going there, could you please tell the audience why you decided to expand, you know, the product lines? Because, you know, I, I've been with a lot of founders of the agency through the podcast and I know that I have seen that both approaches work for different brands, some brands, eight figure brands have decided to stick to one product line or product type let's say and some others have have done the same that you have done which is expanding categories to grow so for those founders listening to these what was your thinking process to decide to do what you what you ended up Yeah. So when we started, like Nightguards was our mission and our only belief, but really it was after customer requests.

12:02Our goal was always to be in contact with the customer throughout the whole process. We could send out question surveys, we could call them, speak on the phone. And what we learned was that they really wanted us because they loved our brand. We were helping them sleep better at night. They wanted us to expand into different products. Some people wanted whitening kits, some people wanted flossers and they said, listen, you should definitely look into this. We would be a customer, we're already buying the night guard. So we decided, you know, to do more research into the space, which was already like so many companies were doing flossers, whitening kits.

12:39We wanted to do something that was a little different. We wanted one, to be a fun brand and make sure the experience when you got your product was amazing. but two be super clean we wanted to target people with sensitive teeth only use clean ingredients and really serve products that would help without causing damage like some brands maybe use more harmful chemicals in their whitening serum you chose to do this maybe you need to use or it for two extra i thought that on the market but it's going to be fully clean and it'd be good and long term it's going to be you know a great product that you can so you said that in 2024 you got your first meeting with walmart how did that happen how did you get the meeting how did that go was it only one meeting was it many of them yeah so we tried to get walmart for many years before that i would say starting We started emailing by LinkedIn, trying to get agencies to get us pitching them, but nothing.

13:50We had radio silence from them. It wasn't really working. And in 2024, I decided to apply to Walmart Open Call, which is a program for businesses based in the U.S. with a lot of their manufacturing in the U.S. to be able to apply and get a meeting. So I applied to that. Next thing I knew, like a month later, I got an invite. to fly to Bentonville and go meet with the buyers for the oral healthcare department. So that's the first meeting we ever got with Walmart. We went in, pitched our products. You know, they liked what we had, but their main concern was, one, how's this differentiated from what's already on shelf?

14:28And two, you need to be, you know, the cheapest on shelf. They want to provide the best quality product at the cheapest price to their customers. So we pitched, we didn't really hurry back for a while. and then I would say a year later we got another email to come for a line review and we went you know we spoke with the buyer we pitched him our water floss which is our current product in Walmart stores and we had you know a unique selling point one was price and two because we have a patented gravity ball on our floss and different features which aren't available on some of the other option so the buyer took a chance on us and that's how we got it our first store with walmart and two years later we have a great relationship with them and super grateful you know that we're able to be in their stores and what's your advice to anyone listening to this who is about to pitch walmart what do they you mentioned a thing or two they value you know the product stands out and is you know you know delivers a great value for the best price possible but what else can you say about that meeting yeah but i think the number one thing is know their customer go to walmart whatever category you're in go to a few different stores or maybe different look at the shelf take a note of what they speak to the manager store see what's doing well what isn't and just based on you know go or as you can sort of map out products that could be a complement to what's on shelf substitutions or different things so for us we always go walk the walmart shelf and that's how we you know start our initial brainstorm on potential new products we could pitch them so i would say definitely go into a meeting if you can get one knowing exactly what's on shelf the price point for each item and why you'd be a strong fit.

16:23So once you, so you gotta be patient, right? Because you went for that first meeting, which took a while to get, and then a year later they called, so you do a live demo. How did that go?

16:41It was, listen, we were waiting patiently for a year not knowing, like part of me thought, you know maybe it were too small of a brand or they're just not interested but when we did get that meeting we prepared really well we flew out we made our pitch to the buyer and said listen we're willing to work with you on whatever it takes price any changes to the product and i think you the buyer wanted to take a chance on us you saw three young hungry guys really wanting to make a difference and i think like just being genuine and showing that you care about the Walmart customer as your top priority and how you can help them.

17:16That's what's going to get you into the store more than being, you know, a huge brand with a lot of sales and so many different products. What happened when you got into one store as a test, got into multiple ones?

17:33So we started as a, doing a test run, I think in a few hundred stores. and then you know after that now we go every year for line review because we're part of remodulars and it's really like a numbers game looking at how well you perform sales do people like your product and that's how you're going to get an increase in stores so we're very data driven and when we go to our meetings we compile everything from sales to reviews and social media presence and we invest a lot in organic um videos showing people we are at walmart and then targeting you know those geolocation next doors that we're in and it's it doesn't start once you're in or not the end of it that's just the beginning once you get in you need to drive sales whether it's through promotions through marketing or through different things you can do with walmart but But I thought getting in, you're on shelf, things are going to be easy, but not the turn is once you get on shelf, that's where the hard part starts.

18:39From the DTC world, as many brands that, you know, launch into Walmart or any other retail store, you know, they do the same. What were your main learnings for anything that you have underestimated or didn't know? As you said, you know, getting on the shelves is just the beginning. But what are those, you know, things that are specific about retail that you don't see online? Yeah, so I'd say number one is patience because working with the brands, it's going to take a long time between communications to actually get things done. And two, the logistics part, for example, you need to test your products, whether it's through UL or Baru Veritas.

19:23and that could take a lot of time. You have to do pre-production testing, production testing. You need to get work certificates and there's a lot of, you know, planning involved that we weren't aware of before and that alone almost a year to get done. So I would say make sure even before you go in, if you get a meeting with a buyer, know exactly what requirements either Walmart, Target or whoever you're speaking to needs for that specific product so you can already start testing prior to your meeting conversation because that's something that really took a toll on us. We actually were delayed in our in-store opening because these tests took longer than expected and we just weren't familiar, didn't really know about all this bureaucracy that's required.

20:08And what about the SKUs? Did you start with only one SKU or only a handful of them or all of them? So we started with one SKU, which is the water flosser, and we're working with Walmart to make new products for them to be in store, whether it's some of our existing product line or create new products, especially for Walmart. Online, we have our other products with them. And same with Target. We actually started with one product, the Nikard. And online, we have some of our other products launching in July as well. What about Target? Does it get easier to get into the second or third or fourth retail store after you got into Walmart?

20:54I would say it, you could say it's easier because now you have the connection with the buyer and you have someone to speak to. But I wouldn't say it's easier in terms of they're going to take their time. They're going to want to review all of the data. And probably there's hundreds of people pitching for that same shelf space. so it's really it's you what you present you got to get lucky as well and by the end of the day the buyer is going to make the best decision for their shelf and what they think will drive the most revenue per door besides you know retail because it's something that we cover here in this podcast too what happened you know after launching to retail in ddc do you see any halo effect or is the other way around because you and many other people who've been on the podcast mentioned that But of course, you need to drive traffic to the shelves, which is one of the main things that people overlook when they launch into retail.

21:50But what about the other way around? Is there any halo effect when you launch into retail? Like awareness from the shelves to the online or not that way? I think now we're definitely seeing a halo effect. I don't think it was instant. I think now we've been in Walmart for a little bit over a year and a half. and we're definitely starting to see some of Walmart customers coming to buy, you know, other products from our site. But I wouldn't say it was instant and I wouldn't say it was so significant. I think it's as you increase your door count and your presence and even in your packaging, maybe you could put, you know, certain things that push those customers to try out some of your other products.

22:32But I would say you need to test different things and just, again, be patient. And you will see, I think personally from our experience, a halo effect on your direct to consumer side. Have you seen that it cannibalized your online sales? I mean, retail cannibalized your online sales? Or do you think it's a compliment for you? I think for us right now, it's a compliment because the product that is in Walmart isn't our core online product, which is the night guard. So I don't think it's been cannibalizing sales. I think actually they complement each other being in the same category. And hopefully we can cross between, you know, the two types of customers.

23:14And again, for everyone listening that is looking to going into retail while keeping their online store and growing both channels, how did the team evolve when you got into retail? Yeah, so we're a very lean team in terms of like actual employees. It's just myself, my two co-founders, and we have another team member in our New York office. We've relied heavily on agencies. So when we got into Walmart, we hired, you know, a local agency that has expertise working with them. And we worked through any challenges we had. I definitely say that if you can target or a big box retail store. It's important to either hire someone or to help you navigate some of these.

24:10They've really been invaluable. What are your plans for 2026? In the last few years, again, we've been chatting with many founders, and the last few years were tricky to say the least. Of course, it depends on the brand and the industry, but I could say that, you know, election year 2024, the tariffs in 2025. So the industry was not in the best place. You know, e-commerce as an industry keeps growing, but, you know, everyone was worried about different things throughout the years. 2026 seems to be a little bit different so far. So what are your plans in terms of, you know, getting into more retail stores, launching new products, expanding the DC presence?

24:54What's in your plans for 2026? yeah so retail is is really huge for us we're really going to try and you know increase our account with all of our partners as well as try and partner with some of other department stores where we think we'd be a good fit we are definitely developing new products as we have for the past eight years we're hoping to launch at least two new products in in the upcoming year and really as well grow our online presence. We're now investing a lot on new creative. We brought on new creative team members and it's not like it used to be with Meta, as you were saying, where you could just throw ads at it.

25:33So now really we want to invest most of our budget in testing different angles, different options and see what works and what doesn't. And what we've learned really is that, you know, you might invest in a hundred ads and only one or two actually work, but that's just the business we're in now. Is Meta your main customer acquisition channel? Meta and Google are our two main customer acquisition channels. Have you tested TikTok shop?

26:03We've tested TikTok shop, but our price point is a little too high, I would say, to be there. I think the average order value on TikTok shop, at least when we were testing it out, was significantly below our AOV. So I don't think it was the best fit, but we're definitely now investing it. TikTok ads and build media campaign. Yeah, we'll see how that. Like any channel, like they evolve. So for us, for example, you know, TikTok ads, when they, when it started, it was for low ticket items mainly, but then currently we, you know, for some brands that sell, I don't know,$2 ,000 products, it works very well.

26:41Not the shop. We don't have experience in the shop, but with ads, we saw that evolution. So I'm sure that if it hasn't already happened, it will happen pretty soon. Yeah, definitely. I think, you know, especially also now with Applovin coming into the mix, there's more and more channels, the brand, you know, market. Now, I don't know if you want to talk about this, but you're currently at Wharton doing an MBA, right? I am. So last year, I decided that, you know, I wanted to brush up, polish on my business skills, and I thought it would complement the cheeky as well. And a great opportunity for me to do an MBA.

27:26I started an MBA in August at Warren. I just finished, actually, my MBA today. I have one more. Honestly, it's been an incredible experience. I've met so many interesting, smart, like-minded people, made new friends. And I think, you know, it's just an amazing experience for whoever has the ability to do it. Anything that I didn't ask you that you like to tell the audience? I think really when it comes to like direct-to-consumer and retail, which is my core business, what I've been doing for a long time, I would say just keep trying. For example, just in my case, when I didn't hear back from Walmart or Target for years, I kept pushing, I kept emailing and don't give up.

28:18Sometimes it takes a lot of time and just keep going until, you know, it will work out. Eventually you will get a response. And in our case, it took, I think, six years, but we got there and now we're in store and we're hoping to build, you know, a sustainable business. Yeah, that's great advice. Actually, you know, for what it's worth, again, from all the over 240 interviews that we have down here is, you know, listen to all kinds of stories. But what many of them have in common is that even product development took, in some cases, two, five years. Probably that's a lot. But of course, it depends in the industry area and the kind of product you're developing and the context.

29:02But when you put yourself in their shoes, it's like two years, sometimes a week, a month, a year sounds like a lot. Two years, five years developing a product, it's a lifetime, right? Only just to validate that after you created it and see if it works in the market. So things take time. Everyone reads the stories on LinkedIn, TikTok, or any other platform and everything looks instant. but it's not that way really. Yeah, no, you have to make sacrifices and be willing to fight for it if it's something you really want. And I think every entrepreneur, you know, has to go on that journey. And if they really want to succeed and get their product out there, they're going to fight for it and do everything in their power, whether it takes one year, six years.

29:56And that's really the only way to build something meaningful. Samuel, where can people go to learn more about you and Cheeky?