773 Courtney Toll: Co-Founder & CEO of Nori

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. Welcome back to the Kara Golden Show.

0:44Kara Goldin:Super, super excited to be joined by my next guest, Courtney Toll, who is the co-founder and CEO of Nori, the fast-growing brand reinventing how we care for our clothes, and one of the most exciting consumer innovation stories happening right now. So perfect gift, by the way, if you're out looking right now for that perfect gift for that person who has just about everything, this is it. So Courtney's Path is one of those founder stories that stopped me in my tracks. I loved it. What began with two roommates ironing their clothes with a hair straightener in college, I love, love, love this, has grown into a next generation steam iron brand used by millions.

1:32Kara Goldin:So I cannot wait to dig into what it really takes to build a modern hardware company, how Courtney navigated the kind of crisis that could break many, many brands, but not Nori, and what she's learned about innovation, resilience, grit, and staying scrappy. So Courtney, welcome to the Carol Golden Show. Super excited to meet you and have you here. Thank you so much. I was just saying before we got started that I have been listening to your podcast for quite some time. I get so much inspiration from other founders and brand stories. So it's honestly an honor to be here. Oh, that's awesome. Well, thank you for the nice, kind words.

2:12Kara Goldin:So, okay. So before we dive into any of the backstory or resilience, can you describe what is Nori? Absolutely. So Nori is iron spelled backwards, which is a little bit of a spoiler alert for both our story and our eventual product and brand. Basically, Nori was the product or the byproduct of a personal pain point. I had just started my career in New York City and I was living in this tiny New York City apartment. and I'd wake up in the morning and I just didn't have the space for an ironing board. I didn't have the time to deal with this leaky steamer. I couldn't afford dry cleaning. And I would wake up and start using every DIY hack to remove wrinkles from my clothing.

2:56And this put a spotlight on a really big market that is ironing and steaming that just hasn't seen any meaningful innovation really since the introduction of the steamer in the 1980s. So my co-founder and I set out on a two-plus-year product development journey to create the next generation steam iron. And this was very much inspired, as you said, from the hack of using a hair straightener to remove wrinkles from our clothing. So what we ended up introducing to market is called the Nori Press. It's an innovative handheld steam iron that looks a little bit like a hair straightener. It has two elongated arms that press both the front and back of your garment at the same time.

3:33It has six fabric specific heat settings, a steam setting, and of course requires no ironing board. Really, our mission at large is to create products that are truly inspired by consumer need with the goal of increasing the longevity of your wardrobe, allowing what you already have to last you longer and for you to feel more confident in the garments that already hang in your closet.

3:54Kara Goldin:I love it. Well, it's one thing for you to kind of hack a product together. It's another thing to actually create it and then launch a company around it. So how How long did that take you, I guess, from the moment when you said, I'm going to put this idea into motion and actually build a prototype and then launch it? So our development process took many stages. And a lot of it was actually done when both myself and my co-founder kept our full-time jobs. So we came up with the idea while in college. we ended up both accepting jobs at sort of different nine to five careers. And we would work on it after work and during the weekend.

4:41So we did that for about 13 months where we would meet after hours on Sundays and start to drop. What do we want this product to look like? We would interview potential customers, run focus groups, try and run an RFP for a product development firm that would actually help us build this product. And then we ended up quitting our jobs about 13 months in. and then worked in stealth mode for about 18 months full-time, creating the product, running through multiple prototypes, starting to build out a marketing stack that could support this launch, and fundraising to ensure that we could hit the ground running on day one and see some meaningful scale out of the gate.

5:20Kara Goldin:So the category hadn't changed in decades, as you mentioned. What convinced you that there was space for new innovation? I think many people would say, nobody wants something like this. They can just buy an iron if they want to. They could throw the Garmin in their bathroom and turn on the steam, whatever it is. The fact that you guys actually built a prototype and then decided to do it, you must have had a little bit of doubt or naysayers out there saying nobody needs this? Of course. I think the most common feedback that we got is, well, why aren't the big companies just doing this? Why haven't they come out with this type of product?

6:08And I think that I've come to have such appreciation for problem-led innovation. I think that there is a lot of products in the market right now. There's a lot of content in the market right now. We live in a content-dense economy. And I think the easiest way to break through that is to create something that is truly solving a problem. And so rather than saying to people, do you want this product? Do you want this product? Would you buy this product? Can you visualize this product? We tried to think about, do you have this problem? We knew the problem that we wanted to solve for. And if we could find enough people that similarly could reblate or empathize with that problem, there was enough justification to say, well, existing market solutions are clearly not answering this pain point.

7:03And through not only anecdotal conversations, but significant customer testing and focus group studies, we're very much able to validate that and had enough confidence that this was really something worth pursuing. I love it.

7:18Kara Goldin:So what was the hardest part of getting from idea to a functional prototype? I read that you interviewed 19 design firms in the process. So that must have also been exciting, but also like, what do we do? But what was the toughest part? Or, yeah, well, I mean, I think just for your average person, when you said how, when you would say, how do you create a product from idea to physical good? Most people don't know what that looks like. And I was most people. I had no idea. And so actually the process began with speaking with other founders. My very first job out of college, I was working in a job where I was doing a ton of cold calling.

8:05I spent most of my days cold calling various individuals to try and connect them with certain clients of mine. And that got me really comfortable with trying to find information that I didn't have from strangers. So I was reaching out to founders left, right, and center. I cold emailed Emily Weiss. I cold emailed the founder of Square and got him to go on a walk with me. And I started to understand what steps did you take? And it became very obvious very quickly that we had to find what's called a product development firm, someone that can work with you and staff you with sort of a greater team of engineers and thought leaders that can take an idea to an actual physical product.

8:49So we began an RFP for the right product development firm. We wanted someone that had of true expertise in either ironing and steaming or really durable steam products. Interestingly enough, there's a lot of overlap with what we wanted to create with coffee machines. So we found 19 different firms on Google just through research, and we drove and flew all across the country to meet with these various firms and ended up finding a group in upstate Connecticut that would help bring our premier product, the Nori Press, to life. I love it.

9:22Kara Goldin:So what do you remember about those first few months, I guess, after having this prototype? Now you actually have to turn it into something. What stood out, I guess, and surprised you the most? Yeah, after we created our prototype, we had to raise some money. And it's very hard and very expensive to bring a durable product to market at scale. because it's expensive. You often have injection molding and manufacturing and significant inventory that you have to keep on hand. And so I did have to go out and raise some money off of the prototype that we had created. So I was explaining the pain point I had, why I thought that this was the solution, the product that we had built, and why we now wanted to manufacture it.

10:11But what was really surprising to answer your question was that I spoke with this one investor and he asked me what it was that I wanted to build. And I said, well, I want to create this next generation clothing care brand that creates tools truly tailored for how people live and care for their clothes. And he said, that's so wonderful. But the truth is that you actually want to build a marketing company that just so happens to sell irons. And what he was saying was that in order to be a successful business in today's day and age, you have to really, really understand how to market customers, how to reach customers.

10:48if you want to make your product or service a success. It's not enough anymore to just create a product that solves a problem. You have to be able to adequately communicate and market that problem and solution to see success. And so it was really surprising just how quickly we had to get smart on marketing, digital marketing, in order to make our product succeed at scale.

11:18Kara Goldin:And so what did you do first then, I guess, is so you launched it as a direct to consumer product initially. Yeah. And what and what was that messaging? How did you figure out what to do next? Yeah. So same thing as I did when I had to create a product. I started networking with a lot of different founders. And I started reading a lot of direct to consumer newsletters. And I tried to understand what is a modern marketing stack look like. and so there's digital marketing you know there's email marketing there's affiliate marketing and I tried to understand what is going to be the best way to communicate the value proposition of what we've created we have a very very visual product when you watch the nori work you're visibly watching it remove wrinkles and so it's it's an easy sell and that you don't have to tell you can show.

12:11And so I knew that I wanted a visual avenue. So we first put marketing dollars behind paid media, meta advertising, and started to show how the product worked, why we believed it was so superior to a traditional iron and board or a steamer. And that worked incredibly well, very quickly.

12:32Kara Goldin:That's awesome. So Target launch, you get you end up getting into Target. Where where were you when you first, I guess, heard that this was actually going to become reality? Well, funny enough, I was actually in China. I was visiting our factory and it was my first ever trip over to see the factory. We had had a number of liaisons that had been there overseeing and set in quality control groups, but I really wanted to go over and see and meet the factory heads. And so it was just this unbelievable moment. We had built Nori as really the first ever digitally native iron. This is a market that traditionally lives in big box retailers.

13:20So when you want to buy an iron and steamer, you're typically going to a Target or a Walmart or maybe an Amazon, part of us totally reinventing the way that people iron and think about ironing was to have a one-to-one conversation with a customer in a direct-to-consumer channel. We wanted this really premier luxury feeling to buying an iron where you're fully educated on what you were buying. We were showing you videos and direct-to-consumer was therefore the right place to start. But now that Nori has a little bit more of a presence, we wanted to just make sure that customers can buy the Nori wherever they want to buy Nori.

13:58And so three years in, we felt it was the right time to bring this to mass and partner with Target. So I had flown out about six months prior to Minneapolis to meet with the buyer there and had told him all about why Nori had reinvented this category where it was really a luxury product that was delivering true results and meeting sort of this next generation of consumers where they wanted to be taking care of their clothes and building gifts or wardrobes and moving away from fast fashion. And luckily enough, he fully bought into the belief as well. And we got that call when I was in China that Nori would be launching nationwide in June of 2025.

14:40Kara Goldin:Oh, that's so, so exciting. So lots has gone on. So the tariffs in particular, especially for a new brand. So can you talk about that and the impact that it's had on your business overall, especially a business that is going from, you know, direct to consumer to large mass retail and inventory and, you know, overall the growth is significant, but then you've got these tariffs. So it's probably your model kind of blew up, right? That's exactly right. Yeah. And how did you like deal with that overall? Yeah, it was a monumental shift and really just a total shock to the system. You know, you're running a company, you're watching your margins very closely.

15:34You want to pass on any savings to the customer. So the goal is that as you scale, maybe you can make your price point even more attainable. But unfortunately, tariffs got thrown on our plates. And it really was almost this perfect storm for us because Target is a big hit to our gross margin. You share in sort of the margin with a mass retailer. So while we were used to making the product for X, selling the product for X, and making a good difference on direct-to-consumer, that was already going to have a significant haircut at mass retail. So we were producing our Target buy in sort of April of 2025 for a launch in June.

16:22And Liberation Day happened, where we saw tariffs escalate up to 145 % on the goods that we would be importing. And it would have made it completely impossible to launch in Target. We couldn't even afford to land the goods at that type of cost, let alone like pass it on to the customer. We didn't even have the cash to bring it in at those levels. Now, that was, of course, somewhat of a short-term issue. But really within about 30 days, we had to, in many ways, remodel our supply chain because Target was upcoming and we felt it was such a huge opportunity both for the brand and for how customers could interact with the brand.

17:03We took what inventory we did have that was already in our warehouse and tariff-free and just reallocated it to Target as a channel. So we had to pull back sort of what we were putting into our direct-to-consumer channel to have enough product to give to Target. We had to put everything that was in China on pause. We just couldn't move it until tariffs started to be renegotiated. We built a second injection mold and started looking at building a factory in Vietnam where we could create at lower margins. And luckily, within about a 60-day period, things started to sort of ease and we got to a place of a 30 % pause.

17:43I think the biggest takeaway for us was just really, one, being super agile, having a team that is small enough and agile enough to react to these types of issues. and two, really over-communicating to every single stakeholder. We were giving constant updates to our investors. We were giving constant updates to our media buyers saying like, hey, we don't have enough inventory to keep pushing on ad spend and sell through this. So you need to yank back. But it really would have been catastrophic. It's still been unbelievably difficult to navigate. But I think, you know, you can't fully understand the impact that these types of policies have on American businesses until you're sitting behind the driver's seat and see what it would do to your bottom line.

18:37Kara Goldin:Yeah, definitely. And you were raising your Series A during that point, too, when you got that news. I mean, as my mom used to say, when it rains, it pours, right? Like it's like it's constant thrown everything to deal with. So how did you manage the fundraising conversations as well? So that was part of sort of this, as you said, perfect storm, which was Target was lined up. We couldn't move inventory at the cost that it was currently sitting at. We had to reallocate. And then on top of it, we were trying to convey, this total position of strength to investors in order to close money. And we had had an incredible growth story at this point and continue to have that.

19:23And so there was so much good that we were explaining to investors and that they were investing in on an ongoing basis. And so really, the only thing that we could do is just constantly over-communicate the steps that we were taking. So, you know, here's option A, if tariff negotiations settle here. Here's option B, they continue to escalate and where we're going to go instead. And here's option C, which looks like, you know, a slower growth year and selling through the inventory that we do have and maximizing profit. Luckily, it really did continue to iron itself out. And we were able to close the money to help support bringing units over to launch in Target.

20:01it. But it was an unbelievably difficult time. And the support groups of founders and group chats was really unbelievable.

20:11Kara Goldin:When you launched your company, so you and your co-founder started it, what were the first roles that you filled in in your organization to be able to feel confident that this was, I guess, money well spent? That what did you need? So it's actually interesting. Nori is a little bit unique in that we have reached about mid eight figures in revenue and we have a four person full time team. So we are a very, very small team for the growth that we have been able to accomplish. But a lot of that has been a decision to outsource more than fill positions internally. To hire internally is just incredibly expensive.

20:57There are costs associated with internal hires that you don't have via outsourcing. And when your business is scaling so quickly, it often takes a very different mindset to take a business from zero to 5 million than it does 5 to 20 million. So really, by outsourcing, we could be super agile. The very first positions that we filled were a digital media agency, finding someone that was a true expert in meta advertising and influencer advertising. to help get sort of value proposition of Nori out to customers. And then the second was a financial arm. Cash is the heartbeat of a business and trying to find a group that was not only closing our books and keeping them clean, but working with us to be really strategic about how we were deploying our cash, when we would need to fundraise, when we could continue to live up our balance sheet, so on and so forth.

21:53Kara Goldin:Yeah, definitely. Going back to the very beginning, what's something you wish you had known before starting Nori? I think, you know, every founder I talk to, especially first time founders, it's they might have the best experience and then they get the confidence to go launch. But then all of a sudden, you know, the buck stops with you, right? You're it, right? And you got to manage so much of that. I think even the consumer, even the happy consumers don't see everything that goes on behind the scenes with tariffs and raising money and dealing with digital ads and all of these things at the end of the day.

22:37Kara Goldin:But what's something you wish you would have known before starting Nori? it's such a good question and there are so many things very literal that i can think of um but i think the number one thing is that you have to ask for help sooner than you think you do um i think that especially when you're just at the precipice of launch you have put so much time and effort into getting your product just to market. And bravo, because that's very, very hard to do on its own, just making a product, making something new, making something that you're proud of. But the reality is that there's this sort of day one shift where you have been in pre-launch mode for so long.

23:28And all of a sudden, you're sitting on inventory, you're sitting on this product that you're so proud of. And you say, how the heck do I get this into the hands of customers? And a lot of testing has to happen. But I think a lot of money can be spent in vain. You know, you can think that you know best and, you know, you can look at one brand and say, well, I found out about them through X. So maybe if I put some money behind that. But you can go through money really, really quickly and spend it way too quickly when you're just testing in vain. And so I think doing your very best to surround you with people that are one to two steps ahead of you, not necessarily the founder that has seen all the success in the world, but maybe someone that's in year one or year two, just a few steps ahead of you and say, what's something that you would do differently?

24:23What's something that you found super interesting or super successful in testing? and how do I get started there? So much of our success has just been finding people that are willing to have a conversation and help us along the way. And so that would be my number one piece of advice and something that I wish that I knew a little bit earlier was just constantly get comfortable with asking for help and saying, I don't know what to do next, someone help.

24:53Kara Goldin:Yeah, it's so true. So finally, last question, If you could put one message on a billboard for every founder or creator to see, what would it say? Wow, that is such a good question. And it could be about you as a founder. It could also be a message about Nori, too. I mean, it's, I mean, I think when I think about how you developed Nori, I mean, it's so inspiring, right? It just came from an idea that you were just trying to solve a problem. You didn't want to walk around with a bunch of wrinkles on your clothes. And so I always tell people, sometimes if you just open up your eyes and look around everything that you're doing, I just think that's such a great example of what you've done with Nori.

25:49Exactly. Yeah. I think that there are problems all around us that can take solving. But I guess it sounds cliche, but it's also a little bit of a pun. At Nori, we constantly, our hair products, the press. And we constantly say, press forward. And there's been a lot of things that have gone well for Nori. And we have worked very hard. We've also gotten lucky in many ways with certain things that have gone well for us. Um, but one of the things that I've almost been shocked about with entrepreneurship is that, um, you're constantly moving on to the next growth milestone. I think those that are most successful, um, are constantly pressing forward.

26:33There's something that goes well for so long, you want to reach$5 million in sales and you reach it and that's exciting, but you immediately move on to the next milestone. You constantly press forward and you have sort of this day one mentality. Like I said, you know, I didn't know what to do on day one. Well, now I'm on day a thousand and I don't always know what to do on day a thousand. And so press forward, you know, notice your successes, but constantly be thinking about the next thing. And that goes for every stage of entrepreneurship from creating a product to scaling it to rolling it out at mass retail.

27:10out.