From $150M Big Bang Paychecks to Rescuing 200 Animals: Kaley Cuoco's Oh Norman Story

0:28This is Kaylee's company. of her pet. Welcome to the Hot Start VC podcast, the show where we break down how celebrities and creators build billion dollar brands. In today's episode, I'm joined by Kaylee Hunt, the co-founder of Own Norman, a pet care brand she launched alongside the actress Kaylee Cuoco with a mission to make better products for dogs. We'll talk about how Kaylee got recruited to co-found the company with Kaylee, why she's the perfect celebrity partner for a mission-driven pet care brand, how Kaylee is leveraging community to shape its product roadmap, and more. So without further ado, Let's get into the conversation.

1:01Katie, I'm excited to have you on the show. Thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me. Well, yeah. Before we talk about O 'Norman, can you tell me more about your background and your career leading up to this? Look, I've been really fortunate to work with some incredible brands prior to O 'Norman. I got to be the third employee for Warby Parker, which was absolutely insane. I was the chief brand officer for Hinge, the dating app. I opened a direct-to-consumer department store called Showfields where we had five locations and a thousand brands. Unfortunately, COVID killed show. But sometimes when one thing ends, another thing opens.

1:41And that's when I got to start O 'Norman. I also am part of a fund called Everywhere Ventures. I'm one of the founders there. So have looked at the direct-to-consumer space and the physical space in a lot of different ways. So yeah, let's talk about O 'Norman. You obviously co-founded the brand alongside actress Kaylee Cuoco. So can you tell us more about what is O 'Norman and how did it all come about? Well, I will tell you, you should always check your LinkedIn messages because this actually, for me, came from a random LinkedIn message that I got that said, have you ever thought about starting a celebrity brand?

2:17And of course, like, yes, who hasn't? If you work in direct-to-consumer, I always think it's about what advantages you can bring to the table. And having a celebrity from the start can be a huge advantage. It can be also a huge disadvantage, which we can get into. But in this particular case, huge, huge advantage. And the reason why it was such an advantage is this is Kaylee's company. She hired me as her co-founder, but she's involved in absolutely everything. She made$150 million for the Big Bang Theory. You think she'd just be like, okay, great. Like I'm one of the most successful, highest paid actors of all time.

2:53Time to like relax. But she has a rescue farm with over 200 animals. And this is her dream company. And what it really comes from is a personal place for her where she just wasn't finding products that she felt were worthy of her pets. You know, we look at the Honest Company for babies and infants. And we look at the trends in terms of how we're taking care of ourselves, our own personal health and wellness. she wanted to do that for animals. And she is, which is absolutely incredible. Did you used to have pets growing up? Yeah. I mean, Kaylee has at least like eight rescue dogs at any given time on top of the 200 rescue animals.

3:31At any given time, I usually have about two rescue dogs and a two-year-old. So that's about all we can take at the moment. But we did a rescue event in L.A. last week with Kaylee and I where we took over our shelter and tried to get all these animals adopted. And both of us had to physically restrain ourselves from taking animals home. It was very challenging. But it's quite interesting also how they kind of ended up with you, because obviously your experiences with Hinge and Warby Parker are amazing. But you still need to find someone that has dogs or cares about like rescuing dogs. And that is not something that you can actually find on someone's LinkedIn profile when you're recruiting them.

4:07So like, was that just like a serendipitous moment, do you think? No, I'm pretty sure that they found me and then they went on my Instagram and saw all of the stinky elder chihuahuas that I adopted. Kaylee and I are two of the people in the universe that think like elder chihuahuas are beautiful. And I think we really bonded over that. I mean, all of our of our products can be used on dogs that are from puppy to senior, which is very rare for a brand. And it's because Kaylee and I adopt seniors. Like, I love a dog that has lost like half its teeth and had a hard life and like love giving them that glow up in that home.

4:45And I know Kaylee has the same feelings. So I think I think there was that magic energy between the two of us. What sets O 'Norman apart from like other pet care brands? So one of the craziest things that I discovered as I began researching into the pet space. I mean, everyone knows how amazing pet is as an investment and everybody understands that the space is blowing up. But when you really begin to look under the hood and be like, how do we create something different? One of the craziest things was the lack of veterinarians working on the products that you're using with your pets. Not even being approved by vets a lot of the products that you're seeing, including things that you're feeding to your animal.

5:25There are only 86 veterinary nutritionists in the United States. Two of them work on O 'Norman. So we're actually building not only like affordable wellness-based products with cool branding, we're building products that actually are healthy, are good to give to your pet, are based on science, are based in white papers. I mean, the amount of scientific research I look at in this particular job is crazy. But to me, I would never want to put anything on the market that could ever hurt an animal. And Kaylee and I are so aligned on that. And so for us, it's about spending up front to make sure that products are amazing.

6:04And I think that in general comes back, you know, it comes back in spades. Warby Parker wouldn't be Warby Parker if the glasses didn't work, right? Yeah. And the same goes for like the best celebrity brands. Like the best celebrity brands are always product first and never celebrity first. And it all has to do with that. The celebrity might help you sell the first product, but the quality of the product is going to determine if people are going to buy it the second, third and fourth time. And that's obviously where repeat purchases are coming from and where real business is being built. There's also this mission-driven component where a portion of every purchase goes to rescue in dogs.

6:36Kay, elaborate on that. Yeah, I mean, I think for us it was a non-negotiable. One of the reasons I think a lot of people invest in PET is because of the margin, right? I mean, there's great margin in PET. Instead of looking at that and being like, wow, we could just print cash over here as a business. I think Kaylee and I were like, wow, there's enough margin here to actually do a lot of good. And so we give back to rescue with every purchase. We've given tens of thousands of dollars back to rescue already. And we're less than two years old. We've given tens of thousands of products back. We use sustainable packaging.

7:08We manufacture in the United States and Canada. Everything is ethically manufactured. We like to think of our brand that every person that touches this product from the first person who works on it to the person that is actually filling bags in the line is properly paid, is properly taken care of. And it's almost as if the ethos of our company is what would happen if a dog was the CEO of a business? Like what decisions would your dog make? And they would make sure that everybody's taken care of, that everything is healthy, that people are benefiting, that dogs are benefiting. And to me, there's no greater good, right?

7:48I mean, don't we all want to work on something we can be proud of. Yeah. And you guys are also taking that literally, if I remember, by actually onboarding like a chief treat officer or chief dog officer. I don't know which one it was exactly. We have a chief treat officer named Hoagie. He's on our payroll. He's a dog on our payroll and he's a rescue dog who we love. And he actually tests all of our products. We also have, you know, a huge audience out there that we send samples to. For us, it's, you know, I'm not a dog. I can't tell you if our treat is really good, but my two dogs will tell you if they hate something very quickly.

8:23We know if something is not going to work. So we definitely use a lot of dogs in the manufacturing of our product. And yeah, whenever we invest in brands founded by celebrities and creators, we're always looking for that authentic celebrity product market fit. And sometimes it's always a little bit hard to determine if this is the exact product that they should launch. But Kaylee is quite obvious. Like she has been rescuing so many dogs. And even if you look at their Instagram right now, every other video, if not more, is about On Norman and the mission and rescue dogs. And sometimes if I look at celebrity brands and I look at their social posts, it takes me a little bit before I actually see a picture of them with their product.

9:02So I think that really just speaks to her belief in it. Like she would do this regardless of On Norman. We don't like Kaylee. Like I think that's one of the craziest things. Like she has equity in the company. Of course, it's her business, but we don't pay her a salary. I get content from her in the middle of the night. She'll be like, hey, was with my dogs filmed this. Hey, was with using the product. Don't like this. Like, hey, like this is her business. And I think, yeah, like you can definitely if you think about other influencer contracts that maybe a direct to consumer brands have made or other celebrity brands, what their contract is with the celebrity they work with, which is like they have to post two times a month and it has to be in feed and in story and they have to tag us.

9:48Like, I mean, if I if I tried to put into a celebrity contract the amount of times that Kaylee is posting, their entire team would be like, oh, she's not allowed to work on this. Like this is her passion. This is this is really authentically her. And I think one of the coolest parts about that is the amount of people that just organically came from her account to the O 'Norman account the minute we launched. It shows you how strong the Venn diagram is between her and people that love their animals. Yeah, no, that's great validation and kind of early science. And I think like what I really like is that now with O 'Norman, she can also have a bigger impact by like the giving back program and like really creating the best products on the market.

10:31You already talked a little bit about the involvement. And what I also really like about Kaylee is that like normally there's like a paradox. So you have celebrity founders and creator founders. And creator founders, they're very natural in creating content and they only need an iPhone. So these are people like a Mr. Beast and Emma Chamberlain and Logan Paul. And then you have like A-list celebrities like a George Clooney or an Angelina Jolie. They're not very natural in content creation and they need these expensive photo shoots or whatsoever. And I think that Kaylee sits a little bit in the middle because if you look at her videos, Like she just records, not in makeup or whatsoever.

11:06It's uncut. The lighting is not perfect. The sound is not perfect. Then like she's rambling sometimes a little bit, but it's just her authentic self talking about the mission. So Kate, talk more about that. I mean, can we think of a better situation for a business where you have a celebrity founder who doesn't require hair, makeup, costume, lighting, a full set of photographers? We've done three photo shoots, like actual photo shoots for the business. We did them with a friend of hers. Like, I mean, she's just not. She is actually who she is. And to me, that was the thing that sold me on doing this business with her, right?

11:45We've all met a lot of big personalities in our time. And sometimes people just aren't like who they present to be on social media or in their interviews. Within my first 10 seconds of talking to Kaylee. I mean, she showed up for the call of me with a top knot bun holding two dogs. I think she was literally pregnant at the time. And she was like, yeah, like this is going to be awesome. And I was like, yeah, I think it's actually going to be awesome. And I think it's a good, you know, we have very different skill sets. I don't I mean, I'm happy to come out and talk to you, Scott. But like, I don't want to be the face of a business.

12:21And Kaylee is so magical at it. she just has this magnetism and her love of animals and her authenticity just brings people into the fold. And it's the first time in being sort of a co-founder in a business or in a higher level within a business where I don't have to do any of that stuff. I can be in the spreadsheets. I can be in the science. I can be in the data. I can be with the team constantly. And it really has opened up a lot of time to really focus on the business. And I feel like Kaylee has done an incredible job of always holding the line of the things that she really thinks are important.

13:00She's very passionate about our products. She's very passionate about our packaging, things like that. But when it comes to creating the next 12 months of our P &L, she's like, you've got this and I trust you. And I think those make the best partnerships where you some crossover, but you've got two people who are very good at different things. I could never be Kayleigh. She's amazing. Her life is so like incredible and fabulous, but it's also, she just is a wonderful person just living her life with her family. And it's, it's really lovely to see. Like, yeah, she obviously has a busy life beyond like O Norman too.

13:38So Kayleigh tells more about what their involvement looks like from like a week to week basis. We have an incredible person named Emma, who is the go between her and I, who's with her all the time. It's her original assistant, who now also works with O Norman. And we have that person there, not because Kaylee isn't attending every meeting and isn't coming to everything. But when Kaylee has to be on set, sometimes we have to make pretty fast decisions. Like we're going live with this product. And like, my God, like, do you like this video or this copy or these things? And so we have an incredible person, Emma, who's able to be on set with Kaylee, even when she's in the south of France.

14:15And she can call us up and be like, Kaylee doesn't like this photo. She doesn't like this image of the product. Like, can we switch these two things before launch? Great, great, great. But Kaylee is actually like sometimes she surprises people who work as kind of third party vendors for our business because she has access to, you know, the company calendar. And she'll be like, I want to meet the vet team that's working on our product. And she'll just jump on the Zoom. And people are always so shocked. They're like, oh my God, Kaylee's on this call. She shows up for our board meetings, our investor calls.

14:46And everyone at first is always a little, I think, like, oh my God, starstruck. And then they realize very quickly the same thing I realized, which is this is her heart and soul. Even if she hadn't ever become a famous actor, I think Kaylee would have started a pet business. I really like kind of the role that you mentioned for her because I speak with so many founders that have also co-founded the business with a celebrity and they sometimes are a little bit frustrated because they haven't been able to get a hold of their celebrity co-founder or whatsoever. And I'm telling them, look, it's also part of your job to kind of figure out how you can actually leverage them to the best of the ability.

15:22So you kind of need to have a bridge that is living in their world and also in your world to make sure you make the most out of your celebrity partnership. because otherwise it's just like two parties who are kind of frustrated and don't really know how to leverage each other's strength in scaling the company. Emma speaks perfect Kaylee and she speaks perfect Katie. She's like also just a wonderful interpreter between the two worlds. Kaylee will be like, there's no way I can get to this today. And Emma will be like, nope, we got PR on this tomorrow. You've got to get to this today. Or she'll be like, she'll come to me and she'll be like, you're not getting this till next week.

15:55Like she does a very good job at making sure that the priorities across Kaylee's universe are all getting met. You know, Kaylee is a production company. Kaylee's still shooting. I mean, I don't understand how she gets everything accomplished. And I think Emma is the glue for us. You know, it allows her, she has full oversight into everything and can jump in and out between the two. Yeah. And before you launched any product, you already built a community of 150 ,000 followers, kind of true like Kaylee talking about the mission. who also believed in the mission. How did you leverage that to launch and continue to scale the company?

16:32I mean, could you imagine anything better than now we have a quarter of a million Instagram followers? Can you imagine anything better than knowing exactly who your audience is before you ever launch a product? And being able to go to them and be like, would you buy this? Would you buy it in this color? Would you buy it in this flavor? Like, how many dogs do you have? I mean, I feel like we run surveys constantly. And it allows us to understand what products our customers are seeking, what we think sell through is going to be from day one and being able to predict as a small business. Look, we have a celebrity, but like we haven't raised a ton of money.

17:10We raised the money that we need. And we're very careful about that. I'm very cheap. I want equity to exist at the end of this. And so for me, it's all about making the right decisions as a direct to consumer founder. You can lose time and lose money very quickly. And being able to talk to our customer really helps us. Really is a competitive advantage in the market. And like with those surveys, do you then just publish it to the 250 ,000 followers? Or is it like a closer group? And like how many responses do you get if you actually post it to those 250K followers? So if we throw up a question on our Instagram stories, we usually get 10 ,000 people who respond to it in 24 hours.

17:49We have an email list of over 55 ,000 people now. and if we send out a longer survey we always have a discount code at the end of it and everybody knows that and so we have a very high level of people who are willing to but it's also who doesn't want to answer questions about their dog like it's a joyful process to be like what does my dog need and i feel like it's also we call like our followers the pack i think they feel very invested in the products that they're making because they see the things that they're giving feedback on actually become products in less than six months. So they'll be like, we want something around bad breath.

18:27Great. Like we can figure that out. We now have two products around bad breath in dogs. One is a dental wipe that, you know, works as a finger wipe, you brush your dog's teeth. It replaces toothbrush. It's much more convenient. People are much more likely to use it. And on two days ago, we launched what is the dog Altoid. It is a mint that is a mint flavored treat. So they chew it and and actually improves their breath in the moment. But it's also a probiotic that goes in and fights the bad bacteria in your dog's gut so that the bad breath doesn't keep reoccurring. Because dog breath comes from two places.

19:00It comes from the gut and it comes from the teeth rotting. And to us, like, we were shocked. We were said, tell us the worst, like, trait your dog has. Like, what do they do that's really gross? And we're like, maybe we can't, we can't solve it. But let's find out what the grossest thing is. Everybody's like, my dog's breath stinks. We're like, we can solve that one. I mean, there's some things on that list that we can't solve, but that one we could. But that was like one of the top ones. And it's one of our best selling products. And it literally came from our followers. Yeah, it's so interesting that the community kind of decides what your product development is going to look like.

19:35Instead of you actually spending years, like putting your heads together, like, hey, maybe we should launch first this and then another product. And now you kind of reverse engineer. Then you build an audience and then you ask them, hey, guys. What do you actually want? Yeah. And what do you guys want us to make? So I love that whole process on how you involve the community. Oh, my gosh. It's also, you know, every time my gut has been so wrong, I'll put something out there and I'll be like, guys, like to the team, I'll be like, everybody, 100 % of our customers are going to say they want this.

20:05And we'll put it out there and people are like, no. I'll be like, great. Like, this is why you build for your actual customer versus just yourself. Yeah, I was doing a podcast yesterday with the co-founder of a company called Sincerely Yours. It's a teen skincare brand. I don't know if you heard about it. I don't know it, but that's awesome. So it's founded by a 15-year-old creator, Liz Matters. He has like millions of followers as well. And they created this community of 60 ,000 teens. We're helping them exactly with what you guys are doing. Julia told me like, hey, we started thinking about this messaging and this naming.

20:41And we basically put it to the test of this community. and then these teens they were all like no this name is so cringe like this is never gonna work and then they actually came to sincerely yours and that was a name that the adults in the room never expected actually to go for so yeah i love that you actually brought it up sweet but that okay i think my i think my greatest fear in life would be to have to build a brand for teens like i think i would be intimidated by them like i'm glad they have those 60 000 people because Because, yeah, I mean, I feel like I'd be so out of touch. That's amazing.

21:17And yeah, you already mentioned that you raised some capital for O Norman. And you also have some really exciting investors. So Kay, tell us more about what was your experience like raising capital for a celebrity founded brand? We raised the first tranche of capital prior to launching. You know, that capital was just, hey, like Kaylee is going to start a company and I'm going to run it. We think here's the market opportunity. We didn't even have a brand yet or a name. And so I always call that leap of faith capital, right? People are looking at the market size. They're looking at your resume.

21:51They're looking at your co-founder. They're looking at your team. And they're making a bet. And that bet's really important, right? Because you want to know that people think, okay, that's something valuable. That could be something. The second tranche of capital, and I always think this is like the harder tranche of capital to some extent because you've now had a year. You have numbers. You have data. and you go back out and you're like, here's what happened. And we call this more of the educated capital. It's not because the first one is an educated, it's just that there's now a data room. There's now, you know, all of this data around whether or not your thesis was correct.

22:28And we were able to raise both, you know, groups of capital. Second group of capital came through incredible groups like Mars Pet Care, Golden Seeds, 1731. I mean, we just like our cap table is insane. I've never been more proud of the people we were able to bring in. But it's the ability sometimes to go out and fundraise allows you to understand if you actually are on the right path. And for any founder who's out there and struggling to fundraise, it can be the environment 100%. It can be that you're too early. It can be that what you're saying and how you're speaking to investors is too complicated.

23:08But at a certain point, if you're getting a lot of pushback, I think you also need to think about either is your data good enough or does your company and your space deserve to exist yet in the market? I always think of fundraising as like a great chance to go out and talk to really smart people and see what holes they poke in my company and be like they're right they're right about that I need to change that or you know there is times when somebody says like I don't believe that you're going to be able to do that and you know that just becomes fuel to the fire of I can do it and I can't wait to show you that you missed this incredible opportunity to know yeah that makes a lot of sense but this day ask like specific questions also about Kaylee's involvement or did I want to talk to her or whatsoever what was your experience like specifically for that celebrity component so I think one of the coolest things that happened was Mars, you know, looked at Kaylee's contract.

24:02And of course, we have contracts for everybody on the team. And they were like, well, like her management team had put in a time limit that she was going to be working on this product. And then at that point, we would renegotiate. And look, they're doing it for in case I sucked, the business sucked. Like, how did they get Kaylee out of this if it's not great, even though it's like her business and she's starting it? And Mars was like, you know, this to us is a little bit of a red flag. And I like was on the phone with Kaylee that night and I told her and she's like I'm gonna draft a letter that just says I'm here indefinitely I'm never leaving is that cool with you and I was like that's great so to me like that letter kind of just when do you ever see that in due diligence of a celebrity company where she states for the record like this is my company I'm here like I'm not going anywhere there's no deal with me like this is my business and like my success and I'm And if that letter entered the data room, there were no more questions.

25:00Everyone was like, great, Kaylee. I've never seen this in a celebrity race. So like, great. Like Kaylee's in. And it comes from her. It's not like I come to her and I'm like, could you write a letter that you're going to like always work with me? Like, no. I've looked at definitely a lot of data rooms of celebrity founder brands and I've never seen that letter either. So yeah, I definitely think that's special. What do you think is a common misconception that people have about celebrity founder brands that isn't true? The overnight success. It doesn't exist anymore. I mean, look, Warby Parker, we had overnight success, right?