776 Charles Brun: Co-Founder of IZIPIZI

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 Kira Golden Show.

0:44Kara Goldin:I'm so excited to have my next guest with us here today. We have Charles Bruhn, who is the co-founder of an incredible brand. Maybe you've seen it. And on the ski slopes in a ski shop or in the airport gift shop or maybe other high-end gift shops around the world, not just in the U.S. And it's called Easy Peasy. So I-Z-I-P-I-Z-I. So I told Charles when we first got on this morning that I've admired the cleverness of the brand name for years. And And I'm so excited to finally meet him as a co-founder. But it's a Paris-based eyewear brand bringing joy to the everyday with stylish and accessible glasses for everyone.

1:38Kara Goldin:And what started as a high school friendship between three co-founders and a simple idea solving the problem of stylish reading glasses has turned into an incredible global brand worn by millions. So easy peasy. now offers glasses for the whole family and every moment of life, combining thoughtful design with affordability. I'm so excited to dive into the story and hear all about his journey after starting in 2010. And really, really excited to meet you, Charles. So welcome.

2:14Charles Brun:Thank you very much, Cara. And thank you for welcoming me here. I'm so happy to be with you.

2:18Kara Goldin:Absolutely. So how would you define the brand Easy Peasy? And then I'd love to hear how it all began. on?

2:28Charles Brun:Yes. As you said, we are three friends from high school. So at first it was a friendship story. We were friends and we became partners. We are friends for more than 20 years now. We are partners for 50 years. And the idea came from our mom. We have pretty chic Parisian mom who started to wear reading glasses when they turned 50, 55 years old. And they were always complaining on the fact that readers were awful and that they were bad looking and that they were ashamed to wear them so at that time we said okay couldn't we design cool readers that we wouldn't sell in grocery stores or pharmacies but only in cool places some fashion stores design stores department stores high-end optic stores so this was how the idea came and since the beginning we We wanted to develop a brand, a worldwide brand.

3:25Charles Brun:We'll talk about it afterwards. So it started in Paris, France, but now we sell them in more than 80 countries around the world.

3:33Kara Goldin:Incredible. So where did the name come from? I'd love to hear the backstory.

3:37Charles Brun:Yes, at first we were called Easy Peasy. We were called Sea Concept. And we realized that in the optic industry, many brands were called Sea Something or Eye Something. And Sea Concept, nobody remembered it. So when we switched from B2B to B2C, and we can talk about that afterwards, we said, okay, we have to find a real brand name, a brand that people will remember, and a brand that describes our philosophy, our spirits. So we tried to find this name by ourselves. But now we were helped by an agency. They became friends now. They found EZPZ. So it's written a bit differently, as you said, I-Z-I-P-I-Z-I.

4:21Charles Brun:And when they proposed this name, we loved it at first sight. And so we registered it. So this was in 2017, seven years after the launch.

4:32Kara Goldin:I'm so curious, how does that translate around the world? I founded a brand called Hint, and we are generally not sold outside of the U.S., a little bit of distribution in a few different countries. But one of the things that many people had told me was that there's different things with names that are challenging for different brands. So I'm just so curious how that did translate. Because it's not a word, a general English word. You pulled a bunch of letters together, which I love.

5:12Charles Brun:Yes, yes. It's a very good question. First of all, changing brand name is really tough. We faced it after six years, so I can talk about that. But it took a long time for us to take this decision. It cost a lot of money also. But after 10 years, we are very happy to have taken this decision now. And then easy peasy. It's easy for you English speaking people. At first in the US, people say I easy peasy or they're not so sure. once they understand it's easy peasy they remember it really quickly it was harder in Europe especially in France because people don't really know what easy peasy means so we have to explain in Italy, in Spain etc etc.

5:58Charles Brun:The good thing is that it's easy to read it it's easy to pronounce it also and afterwards people remind it. But depending on each country each language everybody has a different pronunciation So interesting.

6:13Kara Goldin:So how many products or SKUs did you actually launch with when you first launched the brand? And I'm assuming that was B2B at that point versus B2C?

6:25Charles Brun:yes yes yes so at first but when we when we started our company we didn't raise money we had only 5 000 euros each that we invested in the company so we didn't have money to open our own stores at that time e-commerce was way less developed than today this was in 2010 2011 so we started wholesale and our main targets our main aim was to sell our products in the best stores all around the world. So we started in Paris. At that time, there was a very famous store called Colette, which was the temple of fashion. It was the place where everybody was going to Paris. At first, they didn't want easy peasy because they didn't send readers.

7:10Charles Brun:And they said, OK, but readers is not for a fashion store. Go to the optic store near our place. and after going there five times, ten times, fifteen times, we finally insisted so much that they accepted to take our products. It was consignment and it sold so well that we stayed there for ages until the store closed. So at first our focus was really wholesale. So that's why we say B2B, it was a B2B2C, if I may say. And after five years of developing the company in wholesale, We said, okay, if we want to build a real brand, wholesale is not enough. We need to open our own stores. We were developing more and more sales online at that time also.

7:56Charles Brun:So we developed B2C sales next to the wholesale.

8:01Kara Goldin:And how long before you decided to do the direct-to-consumer, or I should say B2C, but then also direct-to-consumer? Yes.

8:12Charles Brun:So the six first years were only B2B2C. And when we changed our brand name, Easy Peasy, it was also because we had in mind that we wanted to open our own stores and develop more and more online. So it was after a bit more than six years.

8:29Kara Goldin:A bit more than six years. So interesting. So what is your biggest country that you sell in, in terms of sales?

8:37Charles Brun:as a continent it's Europe now inside Europe we have several big countries France of course it's easier because we are based in Paris we have now 25 stores between France UK Belgium we are opening stores in Spain now is Barcelona and Madrid also so if if you count wholesale plus retail plus e-commerce. France is our biggest territory. However, we launched a subsidiary in the US three years ago now. It was the end of 2022 with an office in New York. We have a warehouse near Chicago with stock in the US because the US is already our biggest market for online and is growing a lot for wholesale also.

9:26Charles Brun:We have around 500 stores selling easy peasy in the US now with beautiful customers like Bloomingdale's, Barnes & Noble, the MoMA, and others to come. So we are focusing a lot on US now, which should become our biggest market in the next years.

9:45Kara Goldin:So interesting. So you started really in the reader's market. I'm guessing that is the average age at 40? 35, 40?

9:57Charles Brun:It starts at 45. It depends. For some people, it's 40, 45, 50, but usually it's more 50, 55 years.

10:05Kara Goldin:So interesting. So you start there and then you expand into other categories, including sport, including more family glasses as well. It's very unusual in building a brand that you're going down in age, right? But you guys have been able to do that successfully. You've been able to do quite a bit successfully that is counter to what's normal, I guess, is the best way to say it.

10:42Kara Goldin:Why do you think that that worked for you?

10:46Charles Brun:Yes. So we started with readers reading glasses. since the beginning our aim was to find to develop great design great quality affordable price but very selective distribution and and we started at readers but after three years we said okay readers is an amazing market but we didn't want to focus only on people being 45 50 years and more we really wanted to have a brand for all the family so after the readers we launched sunglasses and with sunglasses we targeted everybody. At that time, there were very few cool sunglasses under 50 bucks, under 50 euros. Probably it was the same in the US. So our aim was to apply the same values to the sunglasses.

11:36Charles Brun:Great design, great quality, affordable dress and selective distribution. So we launched sunglasses. This was in 2015. And then we launched glasses for kids because we have more and more friends that are getting kids, complaining on the fact that glasses for kids were terrible. And so we decided to do a sort of mini-me, same glasses for adults and kids, the same packaging, the same shape, that adapted for kids' faces. So we launched kids' glasses from 2016. And then in 2017-18, we started to launch sports glasses also. Now we do glasses for many kinds of sports. It's running, bicycle, ski, sailing, golf.

12:23Charles Brun:That's why we say easy peasy is for all the family and every moment in life. All the family because it's for kids to toddlers, teenagers, to more elderly people. And every moment in life because you wear easy peasy when you read, when you work, when you're on holidays, when you watch a movie or series or when you do sports.

12:45Kara Goldin:So interesting. So Easy Peasy has a real unique brand personality. And I think it started with, I guess it started with the three of you friends starting the brand, but then the brand name, lots of fun and fresh and design driven, very unique. but I think fun is definitely something that I think about when I think about the brand. How did you think about that? I mean, what did you three have experience in high school with brands other than the fact that you're, you know, consumers of fun brands? Like, how did you think about the brand overall and what you wanted to take out into the market?

13:33Charles Brun:Yes, it's a good question. We started the company when we were 23, so it was just after our business course. So basically, we had nearly no experience. I worked in mergers and acquisitions for one year. I had a partner in finance. The other one was working in restaurants in Paris. So basically, no, we didn't really have experience. However, we had guts. We had feelings. So we always listened a lot to our customers also. You said fun. I think this is very important for us since the beginning. As we are friends, we love having fun together. My partners are my best friends and my business partners.

14:15Charles Brun:We are really close to each other. We still have a great relationship. We are even more friends now than before. Now we have a big team. We are more than 250 people. And we really took care of building an amazing team and being really close to each other. And one of our values is having fun. One of our baseline is put a smile on your face with our products and with everything we do on a daily basis. When you come in our stores, we want to make sure our customers are happy. When you go on our website also, when you interact with us, usually in the fashion industry, people are a bit snob. This is really not our philosophy.

14:59Charles Brun:When you look at our website, our shooting, you'll always see smile. We have a lot of humor. So this has always been important for us since the beginning. And we want to continue it. And I think our brand name, Easy Peasy, is also the way how we work. We want it to be simple. We want it to be easy. We want it to be fun.

15:23Kara Goldin:I love it. So what has been your biggest challenge as a co-founder growing a global brand?

15:33Charles Brun:Growing is a challenge, growing all over the world. When we started, we had a lot of people saying, first, focus on France. And when France will be big, you can start in other countries. But since the beginning, we said no. We believed we had a good brand. We had good products. so we want to sell our products all over the world and i must admit this is tough especially when you decide not to raise money we raised a bit of money but since the beginning we wanted this company to to belong to us and to do it the the way we wanted to do it so step by step we we only spend the money we make every year we were lucky because we were profitable since the beginning so every year we reinvest the money we make so but developing worldwide took us time it's tough in europe and at the same time in the us and in middle east and in asia etc etc so it means that we have to have the the best team the best partners also in each country the best agents the best distributors make sure we have the best stores selling the brand so this was tough.

16:48Charles Brun:And then I would say switching from B2B to B2C has been tough also because it's really not the same job doing wholesale and doing retail and doing e-commerce. So for us, it's a bit like if we had started a new company in 2016, 17, when we started our first stores and when we really launched our e-commerce business.

17:13Kara Goldin:So great. So when you were getting going in 2010, you were selling B2B and you had to have had a moment when you thought you saw firsthand that EZPZ was really taking off to the point where you weren't going to go back to being in mergers and acquisitions. I mean, you made this commitment, but there was probably a period of time that you were just kind of seeing whether or not this was going to work out or not. Can you describe that for people? And what made you know that this was the right decision?

17:59Charles Brun:Yes, it's a good question also. The two first years of Easy Peasy were really hard because I mentioned the readers, but we didn't really start with the readers. Our readers arrived in 2012. The two first years, it was another product. It was really B2B this time, but it was self-service reading glasses that we were selling to public places for people who had forgotten their glasses and had problems to read a menu, a document, etc., etc. And a bit like the pen with a ball chain that you see everywhere, we had a sort of new glasses that you were holding by a stick and that we wanted to sell to all the banks, post, administrations, restaurants, etc., etc.

18:44Charles Brun:And this was our main business for two years. And this has been really tough because even if the customers understood the product, it was really hard to sell the quantities we had planned to convince our biggest B2B customers to take it. And suddenly we had a switch when we had the final customers seeing this product in their bank or in a magazine. They were calling us at the office saying, I saw this product in my bank. I would like it at my home. Where can I buy it? And so at that time, we switched from B2B to B2B to C. And this is how we have decided after that to really launch a real brand, a real B2C brand.

19:31Charles Brun:And after that, we launched the readers and the sunglasses, et cetera, et cetera. so the two first years have been tough because we had only the few money we invested the few bank loans we had obtained from banks that we spent in 18 months and after these 18 first months we had no more money we had this project of launching readers but our treasury was empty and luckily at that time we had won some prizes we met entrepreneurs and two of them accepted to become business angels for us they invested a bit of money into Easy Peasy they become mentors for us also because at the time we were 25, 26 and we learned a lot thanks to these two guys and we still owe them a lot and they were sort of uncles for us if I may say and they are still very close to us now.