771 Andrea Faulkner Williams: Co-Founder & Head Mama of Tubby Todd

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. Let's go. Hi, everyone, and welcome back to the Kara Golden Show.

0:45Kara Goldin:Today, I'm joined by someone who has completely transformed the baby care space. Andrea Faulkner Williams is the co-founder and head mama, love that, of Tubby Todd Bath Co., also known as Tubby Todd, the beloved clean skincare brand trusted by millions of families everywhere. Andrea's story started with a simple but deeply personal mission to find something that would help her four kids' sensitive skin. And boy, has she achieved that. So what began as a family experiment in their home has grown into one of the fastest growing brands in the$50 billion baby care industry. And it's the number one baby skincare brand on Amazon.

1:37Kara Goldin:So what I love about their journey is how authentic and community driven it is. I cannot wait to hear what Andrea has to say about the lessons learned and all of the good stuff that she has learned in building this incredible brand and company with her husband as well as co-founder. So Andrea, welcome to the Kara Golden Show. So excited to meet you and to have you here. Thank you so much for having me. I'm really very excited to be here. So thank you. Super, super excited. So, okay. So for listeners who aren't familiar with Tubby Todd, how do you define the Tubby Todd product? Yeah, we make body care basics for little ones and for the whole family that address sensitive skincare needs.

2:31Kara Goldin:And what problem were you setting out to solve when you created it? Can you tell me the backstory of the moment when you said this needs to be here? yeah so we have four little ones like you mentioned when our first little one came along her skin was perfect it was easy we used natural products in our home we wanted to be great parents we were surprised by how green the products were not in a fun way they didn't smell great they didn't lather they didn't give you any of that like beautiful experience you had in your home growing up with the bubbles and the great smells right those were all driven by chemicals and my husband was working in manufacturing at the time.

3:10And we were like, wouldn't it be awesome to develop a bath product for our little ones that was fun to use and also safe and clean, right? So we had this idea and we started working on a natural bath wash. And during this process, our second child was born, Walker, Walker Todd. So my husband's name is Brian Todd. Todd, the nurses called him the moose because he was the biggest baby born in the San Jose hospital. He was 11 pounds. So that is where the name Tubby Todd came from. So when Walker was born, he had eczema. I didn't even know what eczema was, but over 30 % of children have eczema at some point.

3:50And like somewhere between 10 to 20 % of adults have some type of eczema, you know, throughout their life. So it's very common. I had never encountered it. So I had this baby with dry, rough skin, essentially. It's just dryness, rough patches all over him. And all of the natural washes we were using were just stripping his body of moisture. So on top of wanting to develop this product that we were already working on that would be fun to use, would smell great, but also have a clean ingredient deck, we then had this problem to solve in our home, which was dry skin, eczema. So we worked with formulators all over the country.

4:23Again, my husband had been working in manufacturing. So that's how we had the introduction to these formulators. We spent two years developing a bath wash. It's the same wash we use today and it is packed with hydration. I think what made it so different is that the majority, if not all of the brands that you had seen historically were sitting on a shelf and they were working with MSRP in mind. So they were developing a body wash based on just getting the most cost-effective product out there. And they're thinking parents are going to want to pay less for a body wash than they're going to want to pay for themselves.

4:57So they were stripping out all of the good ingredients, even more so than what we were putting on ourselves. During this time, we've had this whole beauty movement where we're so cognizant of what we're putting on ourselves. And that moved to people being really cognizant of what they're putting on their babies. So what they're willing to pay for clean, effective skincare really changed. So we developed this wash and knew it would never sell in wholesale. And also we couldn't afford to develop enough of the bottles to produce them to send to wholesale. So we just ordered 750 bottles of the product and shipped it to our home.

5:31And we were like, let's see what we can do from here. Built a Shopify site on our own. We had some really good friends who were selling baby products online at the time. Nothing in the beauty space, but influencers didn't exist. But we did have friends that were mommy bloggers. And we were like, well, people read their stuff. So let's send some bathwash to them and see if they'll talk about it. We can't pay them because we don't have any money, but we'll send, you know, a few hundred of the 750 bottles went out the door to people with some sort of digital influence to see what they would say. And so what did they say?

6:09So what we found was, again, we didn't have any money to talk about it. We were trying to pay our bills. I was a work from home, part-time mom at the point. I worked, you know, in marketing at home. My husband was full-time in another career, and I had these two kids, and we sent out hundreds of bottles of soap. And what we found was that Instagram was, people were just starting to talk about things on Instagram. Like, literally over 2014 to 2015 is when this really all started evolving. So it was a great time for us. What we weren't sure was, were people going to talk about their baby's skincare?

6:41Were they going to post a picture of their baby, right? Because, you know, bath time is very vulnerable. People don't like posting pictures of their bathrooms. as well because your bathroom is typically not the best looking place in your home. But people loved talking about the review of the product and how when they used this wash that was packed with great ingredients, their kid's skin changed. And it was such an impactful transformation that they were raving about it. And slowly, these sales started to trickle in. And so we just found more and more people. First, it was the people we knew. And then it was the people who knew people we knew who had a digital influence.

7:18And then it just, this influencer community became really the bread and butter of our Tubby Todd marketing and what we call our Tubby Todd mama community. They have fueled all of our innovation and all of our marketing since the very beginning. And we owe everything to them. So everything we do is really for them.

7:37Kara Goldin:Is there one ingredient in a lot of products that causes this eczema? I guess you have to have skin that is brand new baby skin or something that is really allergic or has some sort of sensitivity towards it. But what was it that you were really trying to remove, I guess, from the products? Yeah, so our products are free of anything that is not natural, right? So all of our fragrances are made from raw aromatic extracts. They're gluten, paraben, dairy-free, cruelty-free. They also are free of all SLS, SLES, folates, any of that, right? So any of those clean ingredients that you're looking for, we go by the Whole Foods Blacklist Guide, as well as additional ingredients that we decided we're not going to use.

8:32Okay, so those can be irritants, right, that are ingredients or in maybe your detergents or things that are irritating your skin. And also a lot of it is just the moisture barrier that has been damaged. And again, these baby products that even are free of chemicals were not packed with hydration. So just getting that hydration in your skin. Baby's skin is so delicate. As you know, babies are going to have cradle cap. They're going to have diaper rash. They're going to be, I mean, like blankets can irritate them. They're just so brand new. And their skin barrier can be broken or tampered so easily.

9:08So it's building up that skin barrier through layers of hydration. So that is everything we do is with the goal of not just keeping everything out that could hurt the little one, but also replacing it with things that can protect them from all of the things they're going to encounter throughout the day.

9:25Kara Goldin:So when you launched through Shopify and your store, you made a decision to launch. But what was the moment when you realized, okay, this is going to be a real business? Okay, that's a really great question. So like I said, my husband and I, we launched this business together. and about three years in, it kind of got to the point where we realized, are we at the point where he could quit his job? And I think that that was the moment that we were like, he could quit his job. We could pay for health care. We had started to hire employees prior to that that were helping me run the business, but he was still supporting our family.

10:10We had a third child by that point. So he was still supporting the family through his full-time job. And when he was able to quit his job, I think we were like, all right, game on. This is really happening. And that was really exciting.

10:25Kara Goldin:So marketing and storytelling and promotion was there, especially in those early days, how did you get the word out outside of these influencers to tell people that you're open for business? Yeah. So it was three years into the brand before we ever ran a paid ad at all. So paid advertising has never been a key component of our strategy, mainly because storytelling and connecting with other women is what I like to do. And I don't like to sit in the back end of Meta. So I was the one doing almost everything. I'm not very good at sitting in the back end of Meta. So until we could hire people to do that, none of that was happening because it just feels overwhelming to me.

11:08So a lot of what we did was through organic social growth. So I'll give you some examples of campaigns. Our Tubby Todd newborn campaign to this day is one of my favorite that we would use to run where moms would post a picture of the day. I'm sure you can remember the moment when you met your children, right? So whether you adopted or you had a surrogate or you yourself were able to carry the child, that moment when you met your little one, those are the best moments, right? So inviting people to post those moments, post those stories on their social, tagging Tubby Todd, and then choosing some of them to give them a giveaway or to win some product.

11:46Every year at the end of the year, we do nominate a family campaign. So we have a charitable giving goal of giving back 1 % of our top line sales. And we've done that since inception of the brand. and we use some of that goal or that funds every year to give to families in our own community who have had a tough year. So we ask our community members to nominate those families and we get thousands of nominations of families who have maybe had a child born that year with special needs, had financial hardship, have struggled with IVF or have lost a little one or even a parent that year. Those families are nominated and then we choose a few hundred of them to gift a year of bath time, right?

12:28So a lot of our growth has come through community activation moments that have had nothing to do with paid advertising, but have been built in connection. The other side of it is just the virality of the product. So we call ourselves the internet's favorite baby skincare because you say the words all over ointment or the acronym AOO. And people, if you're a mom ages 25 to 40 right now, and you have a smartphone, you know what you're talking about because they have seen an all over ointment testimonial. Specifically, we have almost 20 ,000 all over ointment testimonials with 45 ,000 five-star reviews of the brand and growing every single day.

13:07So people are talking about Tubby Todd because it works. And we've been very slow on our product rollout because we haven't had retailers pushing us. We haven't had investors pushing us. It's been growth that's come just from our own family, right? And we've been able to say, hey, we're not gonna launch a product until it's a need that we've had, we've tested, it's proven, and we really feel like we could give this to our best friend to be a solution in their home. So those two points of products that actually work in a community, that's where the building has come from. And then eventually paid advertising came in and kind of supported all of that as all of us do, but there really had to be like legs for it to stand on for those ads to work, right?

13:49Kara Goldin:So, so interesting. So you touched on this, but the direct-to-consumer store that you built, that was the go-to-market strategy. Many times people also venture out into retail, especially in the number of years that you've been in business. Have you thought about going into retail? and definitely, yes. Thank you for asking. And so one of our company brand values is to be a good friend. So in every, and that is the number one thing I say to anyone we interview, a new team member at Tubby Todd, I'm like, do not make it, sell it, design it, write it if you would not send it to a friend. Because I think that was what irritated me the most about being a mom is being marketed to in a way that I was like an old out of touch woman where I was like, hey, I was, you know, when I had my first baby.

14:44I was still very young. I wanted cute, fashionable clothing, baby products, natural ingredients, right? Those were all very important to me. And I think that that is the case for families now, right? Long is gone that they're going to just take the recommendation of their pediatricians. And I do hope the pediatricians are still a touch point for them, but there are many other touch points for families on where they're getting their information for, for their little ones. Okay. So retail. So being a good friend is the most important thing to us. So what does it look like to be a good friend? Being a good friend is doing something right and showing up well.

15:22And we knew that we couldn't do retail well until we were prepared as a brand. We do direct to consumer really well. We're really fun. We have seasonal fragrances. We have subscriptions. We have swag. We wanted to make our Tubby Todd family's retail experience amazing. So retail is coming in 2026. Amazon happened in 2024, 25. And I think you mentioned earlier, we are 95 % of the category's total growth is Tubby Todd in the premium baby market. And we are on our way to be the best-selling baby skincare brand on Amazon. But we want to be that as well in retail on shelves. And so we're going to do it and we're going to do it really, really well.

16:04We just want to make sure we were ready for it.

16:07Kara Goldin:Very, very smart. So what gave you the confidence that you could kind of break into this category, this very crowded category too? It's, I think a lot of people who might be listening, you know, think, oh, I have this great idea. I don't know how to launch it online. And when they start to hear so much information about the category that they're jumping into, they're like, there's just no way that we're going to be able to make it. Not to mention the fact that I'm sure many of your friends, as much as they love you and family, were probably like, what are you guys doing? I mean, and both of you.

16:57Oh, yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. My dad, and my dad, I can say this to him because he has been, he later came on and sat on our board at Tubby Todd for five years. But in the initial inception, my dad was always an entrepreneur. So I was raised, so what gave me the initial confidence was him. But then when we told him about Tubby Todd, he said, so what you're telling me is you're going to take a bottle of soap that is the most expensive thing you could ship, and you're going to sell it online for$14 when people could go down the street and buy it for $6 at CBS or Target. He's like, and you're going to charge them shipping.

17:31He's like, I don't know. The math isn't mathing. And so three years later when he ended up, you know, sitting on the board and also became a very integral part of helping us build the organization of Tebby Todd. We love to bring that conversation up. It's my favorite thing to tell him. Like, Remember when you said that? But yeah, the confidence. I sincerely, I don't know about confidence. I'm not sure if I'm unhinged or naive. I don't know about confidence. I won't answer that. But here's one thing I will say about being an entrepreneur. The only thing that made it so it still happened and the fact that I'm still sitting in the building today is because I love talking to our community.

18:14I love selling this product. I believe in it. I believe in family. I believe that connecting with your little one, like that is the most important thing I will ever do in my life is connecting with my children. Not everyone has the gift of being a parent and it is not for everyone, but I have had that gift. I've gotten to have that gift four times. I begged for a fifth, but I got four and I'm very happy with them. I really believe, I believe that connecting with families is the most important thing that I could be doing. I love selling natural bath products. And so that's how it has worked for me to run this business, right?

18:51My husband loves it as well. So if you're not doing something you love as an entrepreneur, you're not going to love every part of it. And you're not going to love every day. I've hated days of being, you know, the founder. I've hated days of running Tubby Todd. And if it's not a mission that you believe in, I think it's going to be really tough to have the confidence or the energy or whatever you need to get through running your brand.

19:18Kara Goldin:Yeah, it's so, so true. So product development and innovation, you mentioned that you launched with the wash. What was the point when you ended up adding products and how do you know when to add more products? Yeah, so we have 25 ,000 Facebook members in a private Facebook group. We have 600 ,000 Instagram followers at like a 9 % engagement rate, which is like unheard of. We have a million and a half email subscribers. I mean, we are talking to our families literally all day, every day. I was alive earlier today with, you know, three to 400 people for a few, you know, 15 minutes talking about our holiday line.

20:03So there's the first thing. Just talk to your consumers. Talk to your customers. Again, be a good friend. What does that look like. If you're not talking to a friend, then you're losing touch with them. So that would be the first thing. The second thing is I myself am a consumer of the product. So I was having babies. I'm not anymore. So that has been an interesting new role in sitting as the co-founder still, you know, very active in product development. So talking to the moms on the team, to my friends, to my nieces, people I know and love who are having babies, what does that look like for them?

20:41And what are their pain points? Because it's really interesting how quickly products develop, manufacturing changes, even clean beauty and the ingredient knowledge that we're getting, it changes really quickly and it has developed. There's been ingredients that we've cut out over the years of Tubby Todd that we once started with and the reports were saying and the experts were saying these were the ingredients to use. And then we found out there was a better either surfactant or preservative to use to help, you know? So I think that, again, just being in touch with your consumer and you yourself, like I'm subscribed to the product.

21:18I shop on the website as often as I can. Constantly like looking on our site. I don't look at competitors. I don't do that. I don't walk down the baby aisle when I'm in retail. I don't wanna know what anyone else is doing. I just want to know what we're doing because we're our only competitor. I truly believe that. And what can we do better?

21:41Kara Goldin:I love it. So if you had to name a hero product within the Tubby Todd line, what would that be? Definitely our all over ointment I mentioned earlier. I think I'm really excited to eventually be on retail shelves because our three-step process is our wash, our lotion, and our all over ointment. So if you're new to Tubby Todd, hey there, nice to meet you. Everyone should have the three-step care. I'm going to be sending one to you for every bathroom in your home. The wash, the lotion is the basics of skincare for the whole family. So a hydrating wash, a lotion, I use that on my hands. I use it on my full body.

22:21My husband and I use the wash to shave. Like we use it for hand washing in every room in our house. And then the ointment is to spot treat. So the ointment is going to be for any of your little ones needs, like cradle cap I already mentioned. You can use it for diaper rest. You can use it for eczema spots. But I also use it as a hand salve. I use it to smooth flyaways in my hair. I use it as like a petroleum-free option of anything you think of. Like sometimes I use it on my lips, on, you know, chopped cheeks if we're going out in the cold, right? So it's just really a skin barrier. So AOO, yes.

22:53but when it works best in tandem with our three-step process, which is the regulars bundle.

22:58Kara Goldin:So you've scaled without celebrity investors or giant budgets. I know you mentioned community, and your community is just amazing. And I couldn't agree more. It's actually, it's about speaking with them and making them feel heard, which I think you've done it in such a brilliant way. But what would you say the bootstrapping, I guess I call what you've done bootstrapping, right? I mean, what would you suggest to other founders? Like, how do you do that? How do you make that happen? Yeah, I would say staying focused is the most important thing, right? Like you can only do three to five things every quarter, like real impactful goals as an organizations.

23:50So we still live by that as a management, as an executive team. We have three to five goals every quarter. So let me give you an example. Maybe it's like revamping our Amazon SKU catalog. Maybe it's like we're doing a reboot of our subscription program, you know, and then we have like two other initiatives. We're hiring a VP for a new department and we have like a seal of approval we're trying to get for all of our products. Like those are four hard things that are going to take the whole organization. And if we spend three months, all of us as a management team making sure our teams under us are getting those things done, we're going to be far better off in three to four months than we were if we were trying to do 12 things that only all of them got done a quarter of the way, right?