768 Lindsay Holden: Co-Founder of Odele

0:00Kara Goldin:I am unwilling to give up, but I will start over from scratch as many times as it takes to get where I want to be. You just want to make sure you will get knocked down, but just make sure you don't get knocked out. So your only choice should be, go focus on what you can control. Hi everyone and welcome to the Kara Goldin Show. Join me each week for inspiring conversations with some of the world's greatest leaders. We'll talk with founders, entrepreneurs, CEOs, and really some of the most interesting people of our time. Can't wait to get started. Let's go. Hi, everyone, and welcome back to The Kara Golden Show.

0:44Kara Goldin:So excited to have my next guest. Lindsay Holden is the co-founder of an incredible brand called Odell, which is the clean, inclusive, and high-performing hair care brand that's redefining prestige beauty for all. And I have to tell you, it is one amazing line of products. So Lindsay's story is one every founder will relate to after more than a decade in retail, including eight years as a merchant for Target. She and her two co-founders decided to build something different, a gender neutral, accessible, clean hair care line that didn't compromise on performance or design. So that is exactly what they did.

1:32Kara Goldin:And beautiful 2020. I can't even wait to hear about all of that. And reached profitability quite quickly. So fast forward, They are now in Target, Ulta, CVS, online, all good. And they also have an incredible impact initiative called Odell for Good that I can't wait to hear more about. So without further ado, Lindsay, welcome to the Care Golden Show. So excited to meet you finally. Thank you. It's wonderful to be here. What an introduction. I'm like, wow, that's yeah, that's a lot. Thank you. Super, super excited. And by the way, it's Lindsay's birthday as well. So while we're recording this, and I mean, I'm so honored that you would come on today on your birthday.

2:21Kara Goldin:It's just, it's so great. I mean, what better day to make a new friend? So thank you for having me. Exactly. All right. So let's start first. I always ask people to kind of describe the brand, even before we get into the backstory. What is Odell? I mean, you said it beautifully. We are a haircare brand. We're clean. We're inclusive. And we are obsessed with maximizing value, right? And so I'm a firm believer that crazy good does not have to be crazy expensive. And what Odell does is bring that high performance to the masses at a very accessible price point with goop that says it's going to do what it's going to do.

3:08And there's a lot of we saw a lot of barriers to what made it easy to shop for hair care. And so whether that's understanding what's meant for you or the price point, the fragrance, there are a lot of reasons not to buy. And we kind of went through and tried to remove all of those barriers that may have kept you from getting that product in the past or easily identifying what's best for you.

3:36Kara Goldin:So you launched the brand with two co-founders. Can you tell us the backstory of how this all came to be? Sure. I mean, it's a very long one, I guess. You know, hindsight's always 20-20. So I met my partner, Britta, at graduate school. We knew we had a very compatible skill set. And I think over, you know, I think it was probably 10 years later that we came up with the idea of for Odell. But it was really we both went to work. Like you mentioned, I went to Target. She went to Mills and then came to Target. She then went to consult for some other companies where she met my third partner, Shannon.

4:17And I think, you know, we're all moms. We're all very, I think when you become a mom, you become even more like discerning with your time and how it's spent and what you're giving, what you're getting back, your ability to be present with your kids. And we had always known we had wanted to do something on our own terms, but timelines never really lined up. You know, I think at one point we were talking about a baby gear company. And so it wasn't until 2018 that we both found ourselves at a transition. And, you know, as a merchant, you're really trained to kind of look at a category, see the opportunity, you know, what is not being addressed.

4:57And we looked at the hair care shelves at mass and, you know, despite there being so many options, there just didn't seem to be that option that checked all the boxes. And so what I mean when it's like checked all the boxes, it's like, all right, there were clean brands, but they weren't really performance driven. There were salon brands, but they were really expensive and they weren't clean. And then the less expensive brands didn't meet, you know, our personal performance expectations. And at the same time, we looked at our showers as parents, right? And I'm like, oh, my God, it's like bottle madness in here.

5:40There's like my kind, the kids kind, the whatever kind for my husband. Like, why isn't there that one brand that addresses my needs but isn't able to share with whoever is in my shower? And so we set out to create just that. And, you know, I think it's kind of ignorance is bliss sometimes in an industry that I hadn't had much exposure to. But we really believe that, you know, we could pass along more value to the consumer if we went this route via mass and start to carve out what that prestige space could look like in mass, raising people's expectations of what a mass brand could do. And that's how Odell started.

6:22Kara Goldin:I love it. So your co-founders didn't have experience in this industry either. You know, they started to get their feet wet in it before me. Shannon, my ops, Shannon came from a hair care specific brand beforehand on the manufacturing brand side. But she she was the one who had the deepest knowledge in terms of who makes the goop, where to source the bottles from, how to get it to shelf. Britta had started to consult a bit in that space of beauty while at Target and then back, you know, to some on just kind of some of the some brand sides through her consulting practice. But that was more in like the recent years leading up to Odell.

7:06Kara Goldin:So you were a buyer at Target for eight years, not in this category, in another category, but still you had experience, right? Sort of seeing not only how to present products, but also probably having some knowledge about like what it would take. And especially when you're a brand new brand, you know, you don't have velocity, you know, you don't have anything. Right. And so so and you decided to do an exclusive with Target to first launch the product. So can you talk just about, I guess, like, how'd you do it? And how did you, like, decide that that was the right thing to do? Sure. I mean, we really needed scale out of the gates in order to pass along so much value.

8:02And at the same time, to your point, like, I, you know, I knew brick and mortar. I did not know D to C as well. Same with my partners, right? So this very tangible kind of high risk, but high reward if it works scenario is what we were most familiar with and like what defines success. And so it is tough to show up on shelves without having done so before, you know, being less familiar with, okay, like these are your productivity goals or what is that recipe that we think will lend itself to success? Um, so we did have that, uh, familiarity in terms of, um, how to speak to the value that we're adding to a category.

8:46You know, it's like you want to walk in and be a partner with these merchants in order to grow the total business, not just kind of steal share from some existing. It's like, how do you make the pie bigger? And why do you think your brand is the right solution to do just that? And so that was like the familiarity that we had, right? And the passion we had around like continuing to build an offering in total, right, for this category in hair. but I think a lot of brands right they don't necessarily have that have they not had any familiarity or background in working in in retail brick and mortar there's a lot of costs that come hand in hand with it and so it was also setting up the structure of our business to be sustainable in order to support the costs of doing business once you're on shelf and and get the product to the shelf because if it's not there you can't sell it right and so that was really that But I think just awareness that we have, that we had at the time as a newer brand to trust that, you know, we could we could see it all the way through kind of beyond just the selling, if you will.

9:57So how many SKUs did you launch with? Oh, I want to say we launched with nine. And so we really distilled it down to, all right, like what are the most common hair types and textures across the population? what are the key benefits that they seek and starting out with that core of shampoo and conditioners that address the broadest you know uniquely address the broadest population so it was you know volumizing shampoo and conditioner smoothing you know for hair that's wavy and medium to curl defining so we we started with a range of shampoo and conditioners that address like kind of the most core and basic wants, benefit-led.

10:41And then a handful of stylers that did the same. So leave-in conditioner, air-dry styler was among our first. Trying to think, I don't think it was dry shampoo year one, but that might have been year two, but nine SKUs in total out of the gates.

10:57Kara Goldin:And when you think about like facings, I guess you know, that's always such a key thing. I remember when Hint first launched in Target, and it was, you know, we just, we barely understood that. I mean, we probably had three facings. And wow, what a difference it made when we actually had nine facings, right? It was just life changing. And I now tell, yeah, I tell founders now that, you know, So sometimes actually launching with too few, even though it sounds like such a great opportunity, you could be like, oh, gosh, like this is not working. This is a failure. Right. And and it could actually be how you present your brand and how you're able to present the brand.

11:50Totally. I mean, you think about it, it's like those runs are 48 feet and there's just so many bottles there, you know, your category or mine. And it's like, if you just have a few SKUs, it is, you can get lost so easily. And so protecting that brand block and like, honestly, the simplicity and the design of our bottle at the time, which like, we're just these design junkies. We wanted the bottles, obviously the goop's got to work, but we wanted them to look good in your home. Like there's added joy in the usage and discovery of that. And I cannot even tell you how many people pick up our bottle because they're like, oh, it's a pretty bottle.

12:24And we're like, yes, I know. And like, thank you. And, you know, the goop is great, too. And so I think it is that brand block that is the stop in your tracks, stop in the aisle moment to help lend itself to that discovery and finding you when people are looking for you.

12:44Kara Goldin:So once you got through the three-year exclusive, what did you do then? I mean, in terms of availability, I guess, for the brand? Yeah, we wanted to prove ourselves in other channels. So we looked and we expanded into specialty with Ulta as well as drug with CVS. And so we were very, very careful not to, I mean, I still, to this day, there is so much potential even within our current partners, right? We're figuring out Amazon's tip of the iceberg. We're figuring out Target, how to continue, you know, our double digit growth year over year. And same with all of these partners. And so we're very careful not, you know, to be patient with that expansion, but also like super curious of where are people shopping?

13:42Where are they hoping to find us? Where does that behavior already exist? And hopefully that we when we then expand into these other retail locations, that's just more points of distribution that lends itself to more discovery and more effective marketing and then more kind of like ease of replenishment for you as a shopper, you know, to just pick it up. where you're at, regardless of like where you're at, because we all just don't shop at one place.

14:09Kara Goldin:So the name Odell, how did you come off with the brand name Odell? Sure. It's, I mean, I don't know if you know, but it's really hard to find a name that's not already taken. But we really, I mentioned sharing, you know, like sharing, like your shower is a shared space. I looked up how to say to share in every language. And in Norwegian, it's Adelie with a little O over the A. And it's pronounced Odell. And I was like, that is a beautiful name. It's like, it's not, it doesn't lean too feminine, doesn't lean too masculine. It like represents like a core tenant of why we saw this opportunity of just true inclusiveness, you know, in terms of making ourselves accessible to regardless of your age or your gender, you know, at a price point that's very accessible at places that are very accessible.

15:06And so it means to share. I love it. And it's a nod to like, you know, I'm in Minneapolis, so we've got a lot of Swedish and Norwegian heritage up here in the north.

15:17Kara Goldin:I love it. So I read that when you launched in 2020, you reached profitability in six months. I mean, congratulations. That's pretty rock star, especially given that you're at that point, a brand new founder. So how did you do it? I guess you had bigger margins to play with, but and also you had growth. but also what do you think that that's gotten you, I guess is the bottom line. I have to give a lot of credit when my partner Britta is a beautiful mind at building a beautiful business. I love like the brand and art side and the maximizing opportunities. Shannon's in the ops, Britta's in this business, strategist, like we are the three kind of legged stool.

16:06I think there's also a beautiful model when you're selling at brick and mortar where they pay you for what they purchase and they're always purchasing. So, right, you get, you know, we're out of the gates. We needed to raise a little bit in order to fund like that initial inventory so that you very quickly start to get paid for what you're moving through. And we were very discerning. I would say the, like, we did not understand the return on investment on like the D2C types of, you know, levers that you pull as much. And I'd say our margins were not representative of what we see, what you sometimes see in prestige beauty, for example, just based on wanting to protect that accessible price point and passing along that value to the consumer.

16:54And so we were just very discerning with how and what we were spending on to make sure that that really like translated in those initial years. So we could sustain this, this offering. And so I'll tell you, you know, like that's like, it's then it goes like this, you then learn how and what to spend on you start to like experiment more so on like, what, you know, what are the big guys doing with that work for us. And so I'd say we're very much on a learning journey. But that was how that was, that was evident, like the profitability out of the gates was a result of just being really discerning on how we were spending and how we were bringing this to life.

17:37Like, um, with, um, things like we use stock component tree versus taking out our own mold, for example, on the, on the packaging, you know, we were able to create efficiencies by gaining, you know, having larger runs, um, and being, like I said, at a place that has volume to, you know, then gain some more competitive pricing with scale. So we're still working on it.

18:02Kara Goldin:We're still working. I love it though. So when you were launching inside of Target, I mean, first of all, that must have, I always talk about for me, I think it was because we did an offsite where I had to like build out a timeline and I said, this was a good point. This was not so good. And I like went through that. So I always think of life like that. But when I think about the biggest points where you said, like, I'm on to something, I would guess, like getting into Target and getting that deal. I mean, it's like you celebrate for 30 seconds, right? Maybe two days. And then all of a sudden you're like, ah, I got it.

18:44Kara Goldin:I got to deliver. Is it going to work? Yeah. Is it going to work? All of that that's going on. And what was the moment after launch where you said, okay, like, we're going to make it like it's like it's it's really and it may sound crazy to somebody who has never launched a brand, but it's like, people are, you know, it happens sometimes where you launch a brand, and it doesn't work, right? Like, and, and obviously, it's working for you. So but what was the point where, like, how far in or Or where, like, what was the moment where you thought, okay, it's working? I'm like, I'm still having that.

19:26I was like, we need to do this. But I think, I think you're, like, you describe it well. It's really terrifying. It's like, all right, selling it in is one thing. Making it work is another thing. And I think you get, like, that real-time feedback by being on retailer shelves and understanding, like, okay, here's my goal of productivity. Like this bottle of shampoo has to sell one per store per week of every door that it's in, right, on average. And so it's kind of like we had these metrics for success that we knew we had to achieve. And a lot of times it's like it takes obviously like a bit of a runway, like they find you, they know you're there, then they like come back.

20:09So it takes a while to like some patience to like to get there. But I think it was I mean, let's let's just set COVID aside because that happened like a month or two after we sat indoors. But I really think it's when those metrics started coming back where we could see like our productivity ticking up that we're like, this is this is working like we are doing well. We're adding value to this category. We are like what we defined as joint success, like we are meeting those metrics. And honestly, for me, it was a lot of more more of those kind of softer like accolades and tangible like it's like the like how we were, you know, being tested by editors or making, you know, winning some of these industry awards.

21:05and just kind of like that word of mouth that we started to feel in terms of like lending itself to building awareness, but like the stamp of approval. Like I've always said, like it matters so much more to me, like what you say about Odell than what I tell you what to think about Odell, because it's your experience. It's like, are we meeting the discerning tastes that we set out to satisfy? And so it's those kinds of feedback loops that I think really help me sleep at night.

21:37Kara Goldin:Is there one product that is kind of the runaway hero of your line? Yeah, I love this question because I also take pride on the fact that like each of our products warrants its space. And, you know, like we do have we don't have one product that is like far and away carrying the brand at all. I would say we definitely have some hero products that are by nature more inclusive to all hair types. So that lends themselves to being kind of like a larger audience can shop them. Our clarifying shampoo is one of those. It is a great gateway into Odell. Our hair oil is phenomenal. So I'd say those two are really among the hero sets for us.

22:28Kara Goldin:They're so great. I love the frizz, the spray too. Oh, yeah. Detangler. Yeah, it's so good. It's so good. They're all such hard workers and really good at doing what they set out to do. Yeah, so great. So the Odell for Good partnership. So I think that so with the WNBA's Minnesota Lynx and but just overall, like the partnership, how did you decide to do that? Yeah, I think so, you know, giving back has always been part of what we've done, you know, honestly, very reactively and now more proactively through this Odell for good. And how do we kind of create opportunities, removing barriers, making those opportunities more accessible for communities that may not have them?

23:21And the Minnesota Lynx is kind of part and parcel with that. But we ended up, they reached out, I think, a few years ago. And it was, I was like, oh, this sounds like this sounds fun. Like, what a great way to get, you know, one invest in an incredible group of women who are, you know, so talented, so passionate. There's a passionate fan base. They're local. They're in our backyard. And they also do so much good. and so they we agreed to sponsor them for I think it was three years and this might we just finished our second year and which has been awesome I mean the WNBA is just incredible in what they're building and what they're attracting what they're doing for women's sports so we sponsored them but part of that relationship we're like this we want it to be more than just like this exchange like we know you're involved in a ton of amazing philanthropic work.

24:18Like, let's do some of that together. And so part of our Odell for Good investment is in partnership with them and some organizations that are local. One called Girls Taking Action, just empowering confidence and mentorship and community within middle schoolers and high schoolers. So it's, you know, it's just been a really natural kind of organic year over year evolution to doing good.

24:50Kara Goldin:I love it. So when you think about getting the word out about Odell, I think every founder, you know, you want to do Super Bowl ads, maybe not Super Bowl, but you know, you want to get it out there. Right. But it takes money. Right. Yeah. So so how do you get the word out? I mean, you're not shampooing people's hair and Target. Right. You're like it's hard to do that. So how do you do it? Like, how do you get the word out in a reasonable priced way? I mean, I wish I had Like this is definitely part of that learning journey. And it feels like it changes and evolves in terms of like, what should you do or what's the most effective, cost effective or what is even the measurement of success?

25:43Right. I think like the earned aspect has always worked really hard for us. And that's something that we just is like a drumbeat, right? Last year, we did more exploring in like more of the traditional media type of investments with, you know, ads on YouTube or, you know, the search and, you know, there's parts of that. That will always be on for us. But like we can't compete with like the massive conglomerates out there. Yeah, totally. It's like, you know, we're always like you can't, you know, boil the ocean with a curling iron. Literally, that's what it feels like you're trying to do. So I think this year, you know, it's like, all right, let's take it back, reevaluate.

26:25Like we're kind of constantly testing, learning. It's like, how do we really leverage what we can do better as a smaller insurgent brand, as like a more with a more entrepreneurial lens? And so we're really kind of swinging the pendulum back to like investing more in the communities that we are naturally connected to and like spreading the word in that way. And so with more life events and just like events in real life. And so I think it's like, I don't have the answer. I think the answer is to kind of be curious about it and, you know, test and learn, but move quickly enough to kind of always obviously stay true to being on brand and how you're showing up and where.

27:11But it's a tough one. It's really changing quickly.

27:17Kara Goldin:It's tough. But I think more and more like, I mean, PR was always a huge driver of awareness for us from day one. And I think doing podcasts, doing, I mean, you've received many accolades, Inc. to New Beauty to Cosmos. So all of that is really good. And people do, you know, listen to podcasts, they listen to or they read magazines. And so all of that, I think, is is really good stuff. So finally, what are you most excited about with Odell? And what does 2026, what are your wishes for that year for the brand? I'm really excited about the team we're building. You know, I think like that is an incredible position to be in to not, you know, it's like the three of us did everything for too long.