671: Tori Quit The Barber Shop, Built a Brand In Her Spare Room, and Hit $1M In Under 2 Years

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1:06Welcome to Little Empires, brought to you by the team at Founder. At Founder, our mission is to support the next generation of e-com founders. So while you may know us for interviewing some of the world's most successful entrepreneurs, this series is a little different. Little Empires shines a spotlight on the builders inside our own founder community, the entrepreneurs who are in the trenches, taking action, learning, and building their businesses in real time. These aren't overnight success stories. These are real journeys, real lessons, and real founders creating their own little empires one step at a time.

1:39This podcast is proudly produced by the founder team to give our students a platform to share their experiences, wins, challenges, and honest realities of building a business from the ground up. Now, let's dive into today's episode. Hey guys, welcome back to another episode. We have a round two today here in Melbourne in person. One of our community members, Tori Gill, we spoke to her about 14 months ago and she did $100 ,000 in 90 days with her sunscreen brand, Son and Daughter. Incredible brand. Make sure you check it out. We're going to hear all the latest on how she's rapidly growing this brand.

2:18It is now a million dollar plus a year brand. Maybe more. We'll find out. We're going to hear the good, the bad, the ugly on how she's building this brand, how she's trying to go international, how she's working through seasonality, all sorts of things. So Tori, welcome. Thank you. Thanks for having me back. You're welcome. So for those that missed our first episode, which was incredible, tell us a little bit about Son & Daughter. So Son & Daughter is a natural children's sunscreen brand that I started because my eldest son, when he was one years old, I think, I couldn't find a sunscreen that I liked using on his skin.

2:58They either had chemicals in there or the natural ones wouldn't rub in nicely on the skin. so I thought there must be a better way and I decided that I wanted to create my own and it took two years to create and then we launched it on Boxing Day 2024 which has been like I don't know what's that 15 16 months ago now and now we have two other sunscreens so we created one mineral sunscreen and then now we have the same one in tinted one so we've got a pink one and a yellow one and now we are expanding our range into lots of other products yeah so you have such an incredible brand uh for context for everyone i first found out about tori when we ran a competition like a pitch competition uh within our community i found a plus community and tori presented a brand pitch and she won and we gave away i think it was seven and a half grand us like yeah it was just something we did for the members.

3:56And I was just blown away. Like you're not hairdressing anymore, right? Or you are? I still cut hair occasionally. Okay. Like on the weekend. And yeah, my clients I've cut for 10 years, so it's very hard to like say that I'm not going to cut your hair anymore. But I've cut down like dramatically. I'm not working in a barbershop and I'm pretty much full time working in the office with Sonador. See, when we last spoke, you know, we did this incredible interview. You talked about your journey on sourcing this product, how you never thought it, like there were times where it might not come to life and you did$100 ,000 in your first 90 days post-boxing day.

4:31Incredible run. So to give the audience context, like where you're at right now, what happens next? So after we last spoke, that was, yeah, we did that over the first three months and then we quickly grew and we were soon hitting that monthly. So it was quite crazy because, yeah, I couldn't believe that we were actually like doing numbers like that. And then for the whole year, we actually sold 20 ,000 sunscreens. Wow. Yeah. So our first order was 5 ,000 sunscreens. And I was like, how are we going to sell 5 ,000 sunscreens? And then in the year, we actually sold 20 ,000 sunscreens. And to give you an idea, we have just ordered 100 ,000 empty packaging for sunscreens this year.

5:17And we've just ordered 20 ,000 of a new SKU that we're doing, which is a sunscreen stick. Yes. So we've grew rapidly because we've ordered so much packaging. Yeah. Wow. Okay. So there's a lot to unpack here. Let me talk me through your picking and packing the orders yourself. At what point did you go, you know, because I used to see on stories. Yeah. And I used to like some of those. It's awesome. And you did such a good job behind the scenes. And, you know, your Dymo label printer just printing out every day. And then you pack up the car. Then you go to the post office. So how long did it take until that stopped and you got a 3PL?

5:53So we don't, we didn't get 3PL. So I packed at home for one whole year. Okay. So even when it was like crazy amount of orders, my spare room was literally just like, you would have seen on Instagram, like literally full. And I am a mom of two. So, and they don't go to daycare either. So I was like full-time mom, still cutting hair. I was still working two days in the barbershop at the time. And yeah, I would just pack, like sometimes like me and my partner would be packing until like one in the morning or like I'd be packing like because it was quite simple because it was like we had the one sunscreen and we had a few hats it was actually quite quick to pack because you'd be like okay 30 people ordered one sunscreen so you just like pack the one sunscreen and then stick all the labels on and then like however many people bought three sunscreens so you pack all the threes and it was quite fast um but now it's like really hard you can't do that because we've got too many skews and too many different things so it's a little bit more confusing but we ended up moving into a warehouse the week before christmas yes um so a year after we launched uh so we moved into that warehouse and thank god because that week it just kind of went like it kind of exploded and we all laugh about it because it's like oh my god imagine i was still doing this from my spare room like it would it would have been impossible like my room was like bursting like with all the boxes and everything um but yeah we moved in there and then i hired my first staff member so her name is mila she's still with us she packs the orders so she um started in when did she start maybe january or february yep i think when i was like okay i can't do this by myself like over christmas like my partner is helping with me and like i was like hey we need somebody to help because as you know it's like literally just takes you away from the business yes and so she started in february and she's still with us and she's great now she's moved into more of like a customer service role she doesn't just pack orders yep and in fact she kind of does everything because the startup so i'm like you need to do this can you help me help me with this um so yeah that's good and then we sold out twice in the year as well last year yep which sounds good but it was a little bit of a disaster because like we had no stock I didn't expect like we filled sunscreen in September and I don't know if you remember there was like a chart a choice article that came out about the sunscreens yes yeah so that came out in july and as soon as that came out i basically said to my manufacturing company can you please say i need my um formula to be retested at a different independent lab yes i was very quick at getting onto it so which meant our results came back really fast which meant i ran ads with the results and saying that like we passed the spf test and because people weren't trusting these big brands because they'd failed their spf um testing everyone kind of turned to us so we kind of like filled a whole new bunch of sunscreen like in September I think we filled 5 ,000 of the empty packaging that we'd had from when we launched because we had to order 10 ,000 packaging so we had the 5 ,000 sitting there we filled them and within I think it was like three weeks we'd pretty much sold through like more than a quarter of the sunscreen and I was like shit like this is meant to last us all summer I was like 5 ,000 sunscreens that'll last us all summer and i was like i need i need the packaging i haven't even ordered it so then it was like okay i need to order packaging um meanwhile i'm still trying to bring out a pink and yellow sunscreen so i had to order that packaging and i ended up having to like air freight like everything over which in two lots not even in the same one because one was finished first but i just needed it um so yeah like air freight everything over which obviously costs like a lot of money um and then yeah from there it was kind of like a snowball effect of like doing really well because of the test results and then everyone just more people getting like eyes on the brand um and then that kind of took us through but like november came black friday we didn't have enough stock so like i wouldn't i didn't do a black friday sale because i didn't have any to be honest i actually think it's a good thing because we are sunscreen and like everyone's buying anyway so it's like our our busiest time is november december like why are we going to go and sell and people are going to buy it for the the full price so we didn't run a sale because i didn't have stock to be honest but um we got the stock i think it was a week before christmas um we got everything on hand and then we kind of just like went hard with the ads i had to like turn all my ad spend to like nothing um for like a whole month i had it at like 10 20 dollars a day because i was like i don't have the stock and that's i guess what's good about running Like when you run it yourself, you can kind of like slow down this pace of like how things are going.

10:27But yeah, it was pretty hectic. Yeah. So let's talk about growth channels, traction channels. You've built an incredible brand. And I think that's just been self-perpetuating. You do such a good job on founder-led content. I'd love to hear any tips and feedback you have there. But you've also talked about ads a lot. And I want to unpack the ads piece because, you know, we talked about founder operators and how we're helping our members, you know, really take back their marketing, do it themselves, teach them how to scale ads with Nick Shack. And that's been crazy. Some of the results we're getting members.

11:04But talk to me about founder-led content. Like, what would you say for founders on the fence thinking, oh, I don't want to put myself out there. I don't know if this is good content. I don't know what to video. I don't know what to put out there. I don't know. I think like nowadays you just have to document everything and like people want to see that it performs better like especially in an ad form like if I put an ad up of me talking about why I created the sunscreen or something to do with like my face being there and me holding this the sunscreen opposed to like a beautifully like a beautiful image that's like from one of our campaigns like that doesn't make any sales like that doesn't work like people want to buy from people so I think like Like you don't have to, but I think it definitely helps.

11:47Like there are so many other brands out there, especially the big brands. Like I got told when I launched, like, oh, you will never be able to compete with the big brands of sunscreen. But those big brands of sunscreens don't have a face behind the brand. So like people don't know who they're buying from and they kind of like like to follow the journey. They want to know who they're buying from. A lot of people now like to buy and support small businesses. So it definitely like helped us a lot. I would say that I wasn't that confident at the start talking in front of camera, but you just have to not really care what people think because if you care it's like honestly I think when I first started to make one ad or to take make one video I'd probably do like five cuts and I'd be like over and over and over again but now I'm just like whatever like I don't even I don't really even think about it I'll just like take one cut and I'll be like yeah that's fine you just got to keep doing it and I think you just got to be fast and like I am not great at TikTok I'm trying I probably said this last time too I feel like I'm too old for TikTok that's why I've hired some young girls i think you're doing a good job there thanks i mean it's difficult um and it's such fast where i like talk too much where my videos are like two minutes long and then i have to try and cut it down but yeah i'm trying with tiktok to do a little bit more but yeah i think you just gotta give people what they want they want to see the behind the scenes and like like for instance we are launching into retail and i've kind of like done a little bit of seeding like what's the journey is involved to try and get people like involved so that when we do go into retail they'll be like oh my god like we remember when she told us a story about her in like her first like talks with them and what was involved and everything because yeah it's crazy like people don't realize like we've had to order yeah like a hundred thousand dollars worth of packaging up front without anything signed and it's like if we don't go in there like then what like we don't probably need as much as that um so yeah just telling people like little things like that I think gets them like hooked in yeah and I want to talk about because you said something interesting you said some of your best ads that you're running is that founder-led stuff are you finding that the stuff that you put organically on social you just run as ads or you're still creating separate content for paid versus organic honestly I just run I just put on both yeah yeah I think like test it on organic is a really good way to do it like put it out there if it does if it performs really well for example I did a video it was like a trending song video and it was my it was my kids and my nephews were behind me I don't know if you seen it and I had my laptop open and the video was like I can't remember the song now but you have to like kind of look really concerned and it's like you're waiting for results to come through and lots of people done it like waiting for my Harvard results to come through or something so I got my nephews and my sons to wear the hats they were all like sitting at my laptop and then when the beat hits it's like yeah you start celebrating so I did like um when you're waiting to see if your SPF results come in at SPF 50 and then it's like then you and then when the drop the music drops it's like and your results come in you pass and that ad like made us so many sales um yeah so many so like a lot and I test I put that out on Instagram and TikTok first and it got like so many views so I was like oh this is going to run really good as an ad so I put it then put to enter the ad account.

15:01Yeah. And that's what we find as well. Like I think it's a free place to test. Yeah. Right. And definitely the more native, like you said, the more native the content looks, the better the cut through. It doesn't always have to be polished. There's two sides of the table. You can do some really great polish stuff that crushes as well. But when you're a pretty much solo founder, you've got just started with one team member, you have to do everything. You have to work on product. You have to do the marketing. You have to do the content. You have to, if you're good, if you're good and smart, you'll run your own ads.

15:31You have to work out stock flow, manufacturing, cash flow, like all these different things. Right. So I think it's, you know, it's in your best interest to just like make it simple and just test. Yeah, definitely. No, it's, it is a lot when you, I think when I first started out, I definitely was very naive to the fact that I thought, oh, I'll start a brand. I literally just have to post on Instagram once a day and then I will like pack a couple orders. Like that's all you have to do, right? Obviously, that was so wrong. Like so wrong. Yeah. Look, it's not easy, but you are definitely doing an amazing job and the growth of the business is a direct reflection of like these awesome ads that you're doing, this awesome content you're doing, this awesome product that you've made.

16:21And you're like, you're on it. Like it's really impressive. Thank you. So I want to unpack, so you launched, you're off to an absolutely amazing start. And you said, you know, you're using ads to drive traction. What advice would you have to founders when it comes to, I guess, testing budgets? How often you're launching new creative? What sort of unit economics are you looking for? Because that's a big part of it as well. like so many founders come to us now with operators and they've got an AOV of like$40. It's like it's really hard to make it work, maybe five, six years ago. But now you have to have a healthy AOV, like at least, at least 60 to 80 US dollars, at least if you can, because you need enough there to be able to make a profit.

17:16And so the economics piece is something that a lot of people miss yeah well i actually learned that from you guys like from the founder course i can't remember maybe it was a starting scale one nick i reckon yeah was like taught it spoke about um it spoke about your aov which is why i created hats and the paint brushes and the wet bags because essentially we're a sunscreen brand but and it's a 40 sunscreen so i was like how am i going to get people to spend above 80 to get my average order value up and that's literally why I created like hats and bundles and brushes and everything. And early on, our average order value was around$75.

17:55And then like it's gone up a lot from that because we do the three different colored sunscreen. So that's a really popular choice to get the three pack. So you do a kit or a bundle? Yeah, we do a bundle. So the bundle for the three sunscreens is$111. And then it's really easy for someone to add on a brush. Like people love brushes. I basically have like paint rush applicators which is like one's a big one one's a small one and the small one's ten dollars so it's a really easy add-on for somebody to like just pay that extra ten dollars um i played with like free shipping yep um in our peak summer obviously put the free shipping like up which it didn't really make much for different people were still spending but yeah average order value is massive yep um with ads i would say definitely learn how to run them yourself because it does cost a lot of money to run ads.

18:47Agencies can cost a lot of money as well. And also it's just good to know every aspect of your business. Whether you get somebody in the future to run them for you, it's better to know yourself how to do it. I learned from myself, I learned myself, but from when we launched, which was like 15 months ago to now, I reckon I've changed it three times, like the strategy and like the campaign structure. So I think it's always good to have somebody who is the head of the game or knows what they're doing to like teach you like how to restructure the ad account and because it does change and now obviously with ai a lot of it is creative you just have to do so much creative yes so i was adding five new creatives into my account every single week if not more yep um sometimes more it depends like when we brought out the pink and yellow sunscreen obviously i was just like hammering loads of creatives around that and lots of static ads but also like lots of visuals because it was pink and yellow sunscreen so that was had to be obviously visual um but yeah I'd say like five to ten ads a week into the ad account um and just like yeah I don't really turn that many ads off I just kind of keep them keep them going um unless they're like really underperforming but a lot of the time like you think if you don't think it's making you know sales but really that person could have seen that on Monday and then like they clipped through on another one on Wednesday and actually could have like contributed to everything and that's what I got taught anyway when it was like when it was when you're running ads but yeah it's like been the biggest thing for our business like and I mean Facebook ads alone like we run Google ads but not nearly as much budget or anything goes into a Google ad yeah so I think we're seeing across like our members and also just our community like it is so important to bring it in-house to do it yourself to own it to obsess over it because no one's going to care as much as you definitely no way yeah yeah i actually got locked out in my ad account i actually messaged you that's right that's right yes that was the most stressful thing so what happened so like i kid you not i'm not a very stressful person like everything that like i'm pretty chill so like nothing really like phases me that much that was the most stressful thing since starting this business being locked out you're like ad account um i actually don't know to this day like really what happened it was me that like it thought that i was somebody else basically and it just locked me out my account but it didn't just lock me out my account it locked me out my personal facebook account because obviously it's all linked it's all linked um and trying to get onto meta is one thing very very difficult anyway and then i finally did get onto them and every person I spoke to it was out of the like they had to keep passing me on because they were like well we're doing the process to get you back in but it wasn't working it was like a glitch it was like just wouldn't go through and then oh it took like I think it was like I was out for like 54 hours I like counted yeah I remember I checked in and yeah yeah and then I finally got in but one at like two in the morning once because I'd been on the call this call to somebody for ages and they got me back in but it was so stressful because I was like oh my ad's going to be there is everything going to be reset yeah like yeah yeah this is a little bit before so look we're pretty close to becoming a meta partner now and then like for founder operators so like that is a benefit for our members if you need if you need help yeah we can definitely help you there uh but that was a little bit before we launched and now we're and all that kind of stuff.

22:22But yeah, look, I have been there at various levels and it's super stressful. Your account manager is key. No, I don't have that. Yeah, that's what, yeah, I remember you said that. I was like. But I'm also not great at emails. So if somebody's emailed me about one, then I just like, yeah, my emails are flooded. You should have an account manager that would have reached out to you at some point in time. Yeah, which is probably where I've missed it. Yeah, okay. I'll get on to it. Okay, so, all right, so coming back. So Facebook ads has been a game changer, But that in of itself, you have to be careful because I've been on the other side of the table where, you know, at peak we were spending a million dollars a month for founder and it all broke.

23:00And we lost half a million dollars in a month. And that spoke to the reliance on one channel. And you've got to be careful. Yes. Because your whole business is run on that. Yeah, because common philosophy says focus. If something's working, keep doubling down on it. Yeah. And keep doubling down on it and keep doubling down on it, keep doubling down on it. So in the spirit of that, what are other channels that you are working on besides Facebook that is growing traction for you? You talked about TikTok. I think you're doing a fantastic job on organic Instagram. Are there any others? Email? Has that been?

23:39Yeah. So we do Google ads that we're doing really well in summer as well. Lots of brands are actually bidding against our name, bigger brands. Oh, really? Yeah, which is quite funny. That's a little bit of a compliment then, eh? A little bit of a compliment, yeah. But yeah, we're doing good on Google ads, Instagram, and yes, email. I was pretty slack with email at the start just because I'm pulled in a million different directions. But it works. like you send an email like and yeah you can see like how many people click through so now i actually have just got an intern at the moment who is a graphic designer she's really really good yeah so she just started and she's been designing she's redoing all my flows for me at the moment because mine were just built in klaviyo and she's building them in figma yep and making them look like really pretty and like she's really really good and it's actually so easy once you've got like in Figma to like um extract it and put it into Klaviyo I just watched a YouTube video like two weeks ago and learned how to do it um so she's doing that for me and we're now like very like I say to Mila um the other girl that works with me I'm like every single week we need to be sending out an email yeah you gotta have regular campaigns you need a marketing calendar you need to have like have this mapped out for the next six months yeah I know I'm not that organized Nathan um so yeah like we send an email like every week now yep and we have our flows all set up as well and we have like quite a lot of flows like oh you're just your standard ones um set up but then I want to build on that so like I literally just said to the intern girl this morning actually I'm like do you want more hours and she's like yeah I'm like great because I can give you more hours because I want you to build out so much more emails for me um because yeah it it does really work you can obviously see that we ran our first ever sale in February because obviously I didn't do Black Friday I didn't do Boxing Day yep and I just wanted to see like I almost just wanted to be like oh let's like see what happens if we do drop our price a little bit um and I seen a lot of other brands at the time doing like a back to school um sale and it was like schools had just kind of gone back so I was like literally on the Friday I was like I'm just gonna run a sale like I made like seven ads on Canva statics with like 20 % off so it wasn't like huge 20 % off and then sent an EDMO that said like 20 % off.

26:06And I went live with it like the next day. We sold a thousand sunscreens in 24 hours. Wow, that is awesome. It was crazy. And I was like, oh, this is why people do sales. I was like, that's why people do Black Friday. So just remember though, it is a well that you can't tap into often. Yeah. And the more you tap in. Never done it again. The more you tap in. Of course. The lesser return. Just remember that. I think that's why we got such a big return because we'd never run a sale before. We were known as like, we don't run sales. Yeah. So you just, yeah. Cause you train people. So you go, we care if I've been on both sides of that table.

26:42Okay, great. But that EDM worked really well for us. Yeah. Look, I never forget. I think I told this story before. I can't remember where, but I never forget early days founder. People don't even know this anymore because it's been so long ago. Early days founder, the way that I grew it was through Instagram. And I was somewhat back in the day, like a thought leader on Instagram growth. Not anymore, but I used to be because I used to just like, like Mr. Beast, you know, Mr. Beast, how like he blew up by becoming friends with like 10 other YouTubers and they all helped each other. I was part of a group of like 10 other guys where we all helped each other grow.

27:20And that's how I got Instagram, like the found Instagram to like millions of followers, right? Back in the day. And then I wrote a blog post. This is early days found. I wrote a blog post on how we got like 10 ,000 followers in two weeks. And back then blogging was a thing. And, you know, I had all these comments on the blog and all these people writing to me. And it was early days found. I just had the pod and interviewing people and whatever and started to put out some content about random shit. And like, well, people saying, oh, can you do this for me? Do you do any consulting? All these kind of things.

27:53And I'm like, I'm not interested in consulting and doing that. And they're like, oh, well, do you have a course? On a way. And I'm like, no. And so I did a cohort-based course. It was like a six-week course on teaching how to grow your Instagram for your D2C brand, your service-based business, your digital product business. And that's how Founder got into online programs and learning. And then this is where it gets interesting. so then one of my early day mentors that the guy that created the software that allowed me to publish the digital magazine for founder and do the interviews and stuff and put it on the ipad and all that kind of stuff and on your phone and create the software that you know built the app and all that stuff he'd done million dollar launches before and so i was like i want to do a million dollars i had an ego back then like ridiculous i was like i want to do a million dollar launch for this Instagram course.

28:50And I asked this guy, can you help me? Because he's done it many times before. And the first question that he asked me was, Nathan, how big is your email list? And I'll just leave it at that. Your email list still to this day, this is like 10 years ago. It's the only thing you actually own, right? Well, one. It's one of your best assets, Yeah. Right. And you'll be clever with it. But that is a very, very, very powerful channel if you use it correctly. So for like D2C brands, like the benchmark is you want to be doing at minimum 20, ideally 30 % of your revenue from email. Ideally. Yeah. Yeah. It's crazy.

29:30Yeah. So, but yeah, your email list is incredibly powerful. Text message as well. Do you do much on text message? What? I haven't actually. I haven't done much on text message. Is that right? I know. I need to definitely learn more about that. Okay. Well, yeah, look. Because it works. Because I get them. So I'm like, and I don't read my emails. It does work. We haven't talked about our friends at OmniSend. They sponsor this podcast. They sponsor a lot of our content. You went to our event with them. Yeah, it was so good. Way more cost affordable than Klaviyo and integrate really well. It's just a thought.

30:03Yeah. They actually reached out to me the other day and emailed me and I was like, oh, interesting. They'll help you with migration too. They're great. Yeah, so good. Okay, so text messages one, organic, TikTok, Instagram, any other channels? No, I think that's it. Just, yeah, we only spend through, I don't run TikTok ads. I only like use it organically. Yep. And then Instagram obviously is our biggest. Like we've got, we're at 19.9 thousand followers. I think I'm like 30 followers off from like 20 ,000. It's growing nicely. We're almost there. It's growing nicely. And you know what? Some people would say that's not very big, but that's an engaging, really powerful channel.

30:41We have got high engagement. Yeah. Because I'll see other brands or whatever they've got, or even influencers that reach out to us or we look at to maybe gift product too. So I guess that's another thing that we do. And the first thing I do is I'll swipe to their Reels page and I'll look at how many views their videos get. Because it doesn't matter how many followers they've got. They might have 100 ,000 followers. if they're getting like 2 000 views i'm like it's the relationship it's all about the relationship they have with their community yeah exactly so um yeah i'm pretty proud of the 20 000 followers that we've got yeah you're doing a great job yeah and everyone's um our community is like everything like i ask a lot of questions so i'll put like polls up like i'll be like oh we're doing a new wet bag should we keep it this color or should we change it to this color and then i like get them to vote and like with our new hats that we launched um last summer i did the same thing i I was like, here's four samples.

31:35Which one do you guys like? Whichever one's got the highest vote. I was like, done. Because I'm really indecisive. So like, it actually helps me. Yeah, it's fun. So yeah, I love to get them involved. Because then they feel like they're part of it. And then when we bring it out, they're like, oh, I voted for that. Yeah, no, it's very powerful to take people on the journey with you. To foster your community, do you have a Facebook group? Or it's mainly just through Instagram? Mainly just through Instagram. Yep. um yeah we don't have as many followers through facebook but i think that's because like i am who i'm selling to so like most people are on instagram um over facebook i feel obviously some people like still use facebook as well but i think that's just like our most engaged platform so like that's what i use mostly and i mostly just communicate through stories and get people to um vote through things or i'll say to them like we had a question about something and i said if anyone uses this product of ours, can you message me?

32:33And I had like all these DMs and then I like sent them like a questionnaire and stuff. So things like that, it's like, it's really good to like get feedback. And what's really important to distinguish as well is for your founder led content and your personal brand, you still have your Tory Gill Barber page, but really you're doing on your company account, right? You like you, you don't have two separate, like Tory Gill, founder of son and daughter and then son and daughter you've got everything through son and daughter every so i have like three instagram accounts just because i have my barber account and then i've got like a personal account which is just like friends and family yeah and then there's um and then there's son and daughter but yeah i just pretty much put everything through son and daughter i do that with tiktok as well it's like half the stuff's nothing to do with like a sunscreen but it's um trying to obviously build the community of other mums yeah and that's because that's an important distinguishment to make because sometimes when people that that's that's something believe it or not that holds people up it's like i don't even know whether i should create a separate account should i run two accounts and you're just doing one nice and simple yeah i think you build up the brand first and then i think you could i could then be like okay i've kind of built the brand up a bit more now i feel like i should separate stuff a little bit more and then maybe i can like start a personal one where it's more about building a brand and building a business And then I have a bit more like experience as well and talking in that.

33:57I think at the moment, because I have so much work on, I've just, I find it hard to even create content for son and daughter all the time. So like, I just have to focus on that. And I think that's like, until we grow and get much bigger and we maybe have like a bigger team, I think now I just put everything into there. I think that's smart. I think it's what makes sense. And I think it's the way things are moving. But three to five years ago, no one would ever do that, you know? Yeah. It's kind of crazy, right? Yeah, I know. Right. So crazy. So, all right, you talked about gifting. There's another channel.

34:26I just want to pull that back for a second. How many packages do you send out a month on average? Do you know what? I should know that. And I actually don't even know the answer to that question. Roughly? At the moment, it's like coming into winter. So, like, we should have had our new products launched by now. Like, we're doing a body wash and stuff, which would have been, like, an all-year-round product. Yep. I know that so many people say this on like your podcast where I'm a little bit of the opposite. They say like launch before it's perfect. I am a little bit of a perfectionist and I won't launch until it's perfect.

35:02I know that's like probably bad advice for some people. But like, yeah, I was I was not going to launch a product that I wasn't 100 percent happy with. Yeah, that's fair. Because it's going on children's skin like it's it was a body. It's a body wash. I wanted the bottle to be perfect and we're doing aluminium bottle which was very difficult to get right for a lot of suppliers the colour was wrong as I said to you before we started this I was about to fly to China because they could not get this bottle right for me and I was ready to jump on a plane and be like this is what I need this is what I want but anyway I found a supplier and they managed to get it done but it just was a such a long process like I've been working on this body wash for like 12 months I've moved manufacturers four times like I've probably had 25 different samples like you'd think it'd be so easy to make bloody body wash and it was so difficult and we should have had it by now and it's kind of like a bit rubbish now because we're coming into winter and like i should have been able to launch it because then you push all your ads into that where sunscreen kind of falls off like the face of the earth when it comes into winter even though we try and push it as a all-year-round product and people that are going overseas to europe and everything um but i just didn't want to launch something that wasn't perfect so we hopefully we'll have that ready in eight weeks to launch oh how many how many that's that you asked me how many packages we're doing yeah give you a guess we just had mother's day yep so i decided that i wanted to gift to mum influencers as well as our vip mum customers yep so what i did is i got candles and we got labels printed and like clear labels and we made our own mother's day candle and it basically had son and daughter on it and I said mother and the heart of the home uh where love grows and everything I can't remember what it says but anyway it was stuck on this candle and it was really pretty and I thought I wanted to send this to some of our best customers and also to influencers and so we wrapped that up in tissue to the influencers we sent them a sunscreen and the candle so they were familiar with the brand and that was really good because I think it was like a touching it wasn't just like we sent them a sunscreen um so like a lot of them posted it on their stories which was really really good for us um and obviously it cost us money to like do the candles and labels and like print it and everything um and then but it was just nice to include our customers in that and while we were looking through our like VIP customers like some people had bought like 27 sunscreens in a year i was like i haven't even i haven't used 27 sunscreens and i go through a lot must be gifts right yeah crazy some 17 16 20 like goes crazy um but yeah so i wanted to do that rather than like just give to influencers but we do um now we have a lot we actually gift more to content creators than we do to influencers yeah so i get daily an email or a dm saying i'm a content creator i want to create content for you um and we will gift a sunscreen to a content creator in return for the video as long as we can run it as an ad yep smart yeah so because we don't post you'll probably notice this i don't post ugc on any of my channels so i do now now you mention it why yeah so i was taught this from somebody that um your channel should be like a reality tv show yep and if everyone is coming on to your want to see your show they don't want to see a random face in a with a random background so that's why you when you create your videos you should always have like a similar background so when people are scrolling you'll notice you'll notice now that i've said this but i used to always wear a red hat yes yes yes so that was perfect on purpose I wasn't sometimes wearing the red hat that day but I'd put it on to make a video so that when you're scrolling fast you see the red hat and you're like oh that's Tori Sonendoor so it was kind of like a recognizable thing that was in all of my videos that just like made people know that it was me and what the what I was like going to talk about um so yeah that was like so I didn't want to put UGC on our vid on our page because it's not really it's not me it's not really like telling like it's not our tv show having somebody else's face there so i got taught that from a girl that um specializes in tiktok and she said do not put ugc videos on your tiktok um because of that reason which kind of makes sense and then we just use the video for ads yeah no so we have to work towards wrapping up but that all makes sense you've really outlaid all the stuff that's working this past year how you've been growing this brand rapidly, retail.

39:47So we've got to tackle this one. How do you know when is the right time? Because you and I were talking about this and I think it's tricky. I think it's tricky because some brands, like I was speaking to Manscaped in America, the founder of Manscaped, they didn't touch retail until they were doing at least 50 million US in D2C. Yeah. I mean, like I am going into retail in like three months, so I could come on next year and tell you that I've made the biggest mistake of my life. Or I could come in and tell it. How do you know? How do you know? I can tell you why I did it. Yep. And I believe that we were one of the first in the children's sunscreen space to disrupt it and make this fun brand.

40:36we took like normally it's like a clinical white boring packaging and we kind of like flipped that and made it fun and done colored sunscreen and like done something that's not normal so I was like I want to be the first into these big retailers so that we're on shelf and that more eyes are on the brand and being a product for children mums sometimes like need things there and then right and like we do fast shipping but they maybe like need it at that moment so i'm like how can we make it more accessible to more parents and also to parents that don't have social media or maybe like don't see us online and that's why i was like we need to kind of be on the shelf and at first i thought our brand was a more suitable for like a sephora or a mecca but the more we've evolved I've realized that actually you need to be accessible to without telling you where we're going and we have to be more accessible and like mums aren't shopping in Mecca mostly they're in other stores and I was like that's the stores I then reached out to and to talk about launching into them and we were very lucky that three major retailers that I spoke to all were interested in the brand and it was kind of just down to us about making the decision of which ones we wanted to go into and have we made the right ones i don't know yet but hopefully next podcast hopefully but i would say it's a very big investment going into retail and not just the stock like you have to pay for your own marketing in there like things that people don't realize like you have to give them the money to market your brand and if they go on sale half the time either you cover that sale or you have to work out a deal with them that you'll cover half of that sale so if you're ten dollars cheaper in store that ten dollars comes out your pocket or it's five dollars out yours and five dollars out there so it's a big investment and it's a big risk but you hope that more eyes on the brand the volume that you do will make up for it but time will tell yeah awesome well Tori we have to work towards wrapping one last question what advice would you give to founders that they've clearly found product market fit like you have and to maintain traction while being a busy mum, two young kids managing everything while still cutting hair on the weekends?

42:58Honestly, I haven't really figured out the work-life balance thing. I guess I don't think any founder really does, but I find it very hard to separate. I mean, I find it very hard to switch off, which I think is probably the reason why we also do so well, because I don't really ever switch off. I'm always thinking of the next best thing. But I would just say you can learn so much yourself. There's nothing that you can't learn. I would just say just learn as much as you can and you can do anything that you put your mind to. So if you want something to do well, I reckon anyone can make it work. Incredible.

43:38Well, look, Tori, thank you so much for your time. Congratulations on all your success. and I look forward to keeping in touch and supporting you from afar however we can. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Hey, Founder Fam, thank you so much for tuning in today and if you enjoyed this episode, please take the time to leave us a review and let us know what you think. This podcast is 100 % free. We work so hard to go out and find the most successful entrepreneurs and founders in the world. Your feedback helps us grow, improve and even bring on more incredible guests and insights. So if you have a second, please take a moment, leave us a review.

44:15It really makes a difference. Thanks again for listening and I'll catch you on the next show.