#76 - Thea Mathias - Our Place [VP International]

0:00Thea Mathias:Hello, hello, hello, and welcome back to Young Founders. Today, I am joined by the wonderful Thea Mathias, who is the VP International of Our Place. Now, Our Place make the most gorgeous, aesthetically pleasing, and functional cookware from their always pan to their gorgeous new oven. Everyone is using it. And I wanted to dig into why is this brand so successful? How have they built this brand in just six years? And what's Thea's role in that? How has she come in to who actually lead in all these different international markets with strategy, with growth. What's her background? She's an absolute joy to speak to.

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1:26Thea Mathias:hello and welcome back to the unfounders today i'm joined by the wonderful thea mathias so thea can you let everyone know where you work and what your role is there i am the vp international for our place um which means i do two things really one i manage the growth of our markets outside of the US, which is the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and we've just launched France. And then two, I launch our brand in new countries as well. Amazing. So for those who are going, our place, I'm sure I've heard of it. I don't know what it is. Like you will have seen their pots, pans, their beautiful cookware on Instagram.

2:01Thea Mathias:So for anyone who's new to the brand, like what's the story? Who's the founders? How long did it go? And like all that good stuff, because I just seem to remember a couple of years ago, just blew up on Instagram and everyone was cooking with this most gorgeous like pots and pans and I was like what is this brand how is it everywhere what are they doing and it's not even been around that long it's amazing yeah we are a six-year-old brand we're an LA-based brand and we launched just at the end of 2019 and we make beautiful multifunctional non-toxic cookware which is designed for the modern home and yes as you say we launched at the end of 2019 and it really blew up through 2020 when people were stuck in their homes and they were just cooking for themselves.

2:41They were not eating out and they were looking for a little bit more joy in doing that. And we launched with the Viral Always Pan, which is our hero product. And that's what really launched the brand. And now we have a full cookware collection, various different materials, shapes, sizes, colors. And then we also have launched appliances, dinnerware, tableware, glasses all sorts of different products now amazing yeah i remember it was that always pan

3:08Thea Mathias:you just kept seeing and then more recently i've seen like the the stainless steel kind of like yeah all the different stuff the is it the wonder oven you've just got a yes ongoing range of things so um like for you personally how did you come across the brand and go that's where i want to work like this this is a bit of me interestingly i first came across the brand actually in 2022 so kind of after the main bit of hype and I came across it when I had gotten engaged and I had bought a house and my friend said to me oh my gosh this is the pan that you really need on your wedding list this is the perfect wedding gift and so that's how I was introduced to the brand and then I was actually headhunted for the role I was running international growth at a different business and originally when they headhunted me for the role I was in a tech business and I thought I don't really know that I want to go and sell these pans.

3:59I'm not sure that I'm really interested in that. And I don't know if I want to be in the D2C space. But the recruiter said to me, listen, why don't you just meet the founders? There's no harm in doing that and see how you get on with them. And truly like the most important thing in working in a startup is, is the founders and how you get on with them and how you kind of believe in their vision. So I thought, sure, I'll take that conversation. And we have two co-founders and co-CEOs, and they bring very, very different things to the business. And I met them and I was just like, do you know what?

4:31I think these are people that I could learn a lot from. And it feels like this is a business that is really going somewhere. I don't think this is actually a one hit wonder. I think they're going to be able to keep building on the success of the Always Pan and that could be pretty fun. So my boss, Shiza, she, before she did this, she was the founding CEO of the Malala Fund. So she worked with Malala Yousafzai when she was building that fund after having been shot by the Taliban in her pursuit of education. And I just thought, how is it that this woman has gone from founding this education charity and building it into one of the most respected charities in the world to now running this D2C cookware brand?

5:13And I just wanted to be a part of that journey. So that's how I ended up at Outer Place. It was definitely felt a bit random at the time moving from tech into D2C. But yeah, it's been a great journey and they're great founders. So here we are.

5:28Thea Mathias:Yeah, I love that. Yeah, I think that when I was looking into Shiz's background and like everything that she's done and like it just looks absolutely phenomenal. Like how big is the team there? Because I know before we start recording, you said it's like US, but then you've got all these other markets. So yeah, how many people in the team and how often do you actually get together or get to speak to all these different areas? We are about 100 people in total. And the majority of people are based in LA. That is like the hub, that's the heart of the business. And we have a retail space in LA. So we have a retail team there.

6:01And then there are four of us in the UK. So we're a very small team in the UK. There's me, two performance marketers, and a man who manages all of our logistics for our retail partnerships like Selfridges and Harrods. And I get to see the team probably three times a year. I go to LA. So we do three leadership strategy sessions a year, one in January, one in March and one in September. So I go to LA for those three times a year. And then the full company gets together once a year for our company retreat, where we talk about the vision, we talk about the big plans for the next year. And we also just eat a lot of great food together and spend time together and just really be present with each other in person.

6:46Thea Mathias:Yeah, love that. And I think I saw you've got like an annual retreat, which just come off the back of what was it in Mexico, it looked absolutely stunning. What an experience. But yeah, I think from a remote perspective, I think it's so important when you get people together, like what was that experience like? And I guess you've been there a couple of years now. Was this your second one or first one? It was my second one. I missed one in the middle because I was heavily pregnant and I couldn't fly for it. But this was our first one truly abroad. We went to Oaxaca, which it's a very natural fit for us because they have such a rich food culture and cooking culture.

7:23And there's a lot of history to explore. So we did cooking classes together and we did town tours together. It's also the place that we built our first piece of tradition wear. So we create these tradition wear collections where we create cookware that honors lots of different food tradition. We've done a Shabbat collection, an Eid collection, a Pride collection, a Noche Buena, a Lunar New Year, like all sorts of different food cultures that we've tried to honor. And the first one was made in Oaxaca. So we also went to see that factory, which was very exciting. It was a real part of Our Place history.

7:56And I think the thing that happens when you spend time together is you're just reminded that everybody's really a person. You know, you're reminded that, okay, fine, maybe they missed the deadline or they're deprioritizing something or you're figuring out how to work together. And then you spend time together and you remember that, oh my gosh, they've got other stuff going on in their life and they really are trying the best. And it just helps you to have more compassion for each other and also to have fun together, which just like eases the way that you work together. You know, you have time to talk about the things you don't normally talk about.

8:29You'd ask about their pets, about their holidays, about those things that maybe don't happen otherwise. And so that's really, really valuable. And then I think it's also really funny when you meet someone in real life, and they're just not quite how you expected. People are always like, Oh my god, Thea, you're actually so short. I just didn't realize how short you are. And it's true, I'm not very tall.

8:49Thea Mathias:Yeah, yeah, I think everyone who's worked with any international teams has that moment of like, Oh, like, you're not quite, I get told all the time from my LinkedIn, it's like, Oh, you don't look like you're doing a LinkedIn picture. I was like, it's literally like taken with my phone yesterday how does that work but in real life everyone's very different but from like a day-to-day or week-to-week perspective for your role how how does it kind of like work across all these different markets because i imagine every market operates different from a sales and retail channels d2c like everywhere's gonna have different operational difficulties what does a typical week or month look like for you i just think it's fascinating digging into like what someone of your position actually does across a week, for example?

9:29I know that everybody says this, but truly my weeks look different all the time. And it's probably like the best and also the worst part of the role is there is always changing priorities. So if I think about my time at Our Place, when I first arrived, the focus was really on nailing growth in the UK. The UK was still a relatively fresh market and it had great traction and we knew there was more potential there. So it was really about like writing the strategy and building the brand awareness and building the brand love in the UK. So that might be thinking about which influences we work with, driving a more local strategy, making sure we're speaking to the right UK moments, not just the American moments, localizing the creative, localizing the copy, making sure that we are really like focused on the UK.

10:20And we got that into a great place. The UK is growing. Then it was about launching Australia and that's different again. Then I'm speaking to other D2C brands that have launched in Australia or Australian brands and I'm learning from them what works well, where are these consumers similar to the consumers we have, where are they different, what messaging might land well and I'm also looking at our previous launches and I'm thinking okay what can we learn from these launches, what went well with the way that we launched the UK and what would we do differently for how we want to launch in Australia, how we want the brand to show up, do we want to lead with the always pan the way we did in the other markets?

10:56Or do we want to lead with the brand first and less of a product focus? How do we want to think about that? Then it might turn to wholesale for a while. We just built our first permanent space at Selfridges. So we built a shop and a shop at Selfridges. And in that period, it's very hands-on. We're literally being sent the paint samples. We're being sent the tile samples. I'm putting them together in my sitting room and I'm thinking, are these colors going to work? Is this going to represent the brand that we want the way we want to represent it? Is this going to enable people to imagine the cookware in their own home and encourage them to purchase it?

11:33That's like very hands-on. That's a lot of like actual moving stock around physical products, physical samples. Then we launched France and that's a different thing again. And in the last two weeks, I just got back from Paris where we launched our first pop-up at Mercey, which is a very cool concept store in Paris. And that's really about consumer education. We're introducing the brand to people there. We're learning what's resonating with them, which products are they walking to when they walk in the pop-up? What questions are they asking about the products when they walk in the pop-up? How should we translate this to our ad strategy?

12:11Where do we need to educate consumers on what's different about us versus the market? where do they already have understanding about how our brand fits in and then we also hosted a dinner with press and influencers and that's just fun and right now i'm finishing our 2026-2026 for international that i will present at the strategy sessions in january in la amazing sorry that's a

12:34Thea Mathias:long answer no it's perfect yeah i think it's that's the problem with like any kind of role in any business it's not very much like okay this is my role unless you're doing something like operations people kind of go okay i get it on a top line like functional basis but i think it's you know everything like this especially where you are dealing with so many markets so many different ways of selling like when you first came in and you were looking at the uk as i said for me social media was a huge part of it and it was influencers but the beauty of when i'm normally speaking to brands we are the kind of the food and drink side of it so it's always like oh how do we collaborate with another brand and do this whereas when you are actually the vessel that people are going to be cooking in you could work with anyone and everyone's how big is kind of that strategic partnerships been for our place but still you've even got like a range of Selena Gomez for example all sorts around that and I think obviously the way you guys have grown internationally is just phenomenal so I'd love to like try and unpick some of like those key levers where you're like this has been amazing for us and this has worked really well totally we have done partnerships at every level of the scale as you say and it's only a six-year-old brand so that has been a very core part of our growth strategy.

13:39We were incredibly lucky to work with Selena Gomez very early on in the life of the business. And she was doing her YouTube cooking at home channel. So we were really trying to speak to home cooks. And that was perfect, a perfect match. And at the time that we released our second collection with her, she made four colors for us. Overall, at the time that we released our second collection with her, she was the single most followed person on Instagram in the world. And then promptly, because she's iconic, then deleted Instagram. But, you know, it doesn't get bigger than that. And that was amazing for reach.

14:19You cannot beat that kind of thing to just reach people around the world. And for years after that, when we asked people how they heard about us, Selena was always up there in the top answers of how people started to hear about us. But then once you've gotten to that kind of reach and that kind of awareness, now we are thinking about partnerships that speak to very specific stories that we're trying to sell or to very specific segments of our customer base. So we did a partnership with Bridget Romanak, who is Beyonce's interior designer. And that's a real like, if you know, you know, kind of partnership.

14:57Like if you're really into the design space and the interior space, then you know this brings a lot of authority with it. But if you're not, then you're not. So we're really speaking in that case to the design elements of the products. And we design all of our products in-house. They're designed by our team in LA. This is like a very thoughtful process for the way that we create the products. We hold over 300 patents on the technology. Like these are really developed in-house and designed by us. You can't get this anywhere else. And the other kind of partnerships that have worked really well for us are chef partnerships.

15:30So we have done partnerships with professional chefs across all of our different markets. So we flew to Australia to shoot with an Australian chef to really speak to those customers and somebody who's very beloved in their local Bondi Beach community. And similarly, we've worked with professional chefs in France, where it's very relevant to the Parisian food scene or in London. And that has been really, really effective. We also have a partnership at the moment with Kenji Lopez-Alt, who's a New York Times bestselling author, but he's really very well respected by the people who know him, but he's not that widely known.

16:10And that's also to bring this like authenticity to the brand and this authority around the quality of the cookware. Because if Kenji uses it and he speaks about it and he's truly like working with us to design the products and to develop them then you know that you're getting something that is truly professional level yeah no i think that's

16:28Thea Mathias:fantastic and i think it's ultimately the product at the end of the day is fantastic like you can do a lot to hype up a thing like look at prime for example it was just two faces got it everywhere scarcity mindset and all of that but ultimately the product didn't deliver and it's died out but what you guys have at the core of it all is an incredible product range so for those who are kind of still going well it's cookware like how are they doing this like what what is it about your cookware other than how it looks and that makes it so special like what is it to you you're like this is this is why we're doing so well i think there are two reasons on it's truly a joy to cook with and i'd say that genuinely the single thing that we haven't found most effective is getting the cookware into the hands of people because people are not that excited about cookware until they try it.

17:13For example, when we launched in the UK, we brought on a PR team who are fantastic. And we had these lofty visions of where we wanted the product placed and we wanted it in Vogue and we wanted it in Vanity Fair and we wanted it everywhere. And originally, they were just not that excited about cookware. Cookware doesn't belong in Vogue. But we got it into the hands of the editors. And once they use it, they understand. And now it's regularly featured in Vogue. Like once you use it, you really feel just how fun it is to cook with. And it lives up to what we're trying to do. And what we're trying to do is celebrate the joy of home cooking and encourage people to cook and spend time with the people they love more regularly.

17:50So that has been really effective. Having great products, you actually can't beat it. And the other thing that we have done that is very different to the rest of the cookware industry is around this cultural inclusion piece. We aimed to create a brand where everyone can see their food cultures reflected. everybody's like, oh, I don't need to be a professional chef to use this. This is perfect for me scrambling my eggs. This is perfect for me making beans on toast. This is perfect for me reheating my leftover pizza. The Wonder Rubbin is fantastic for reheating leftover pizza. And that was different to what was really showing up in the space before.

18:24In the space before, it was lots of Michelin level chefs and, you know, very fancy Quinelles and crazy ingredients. And that didn't reflect the way that most people cook for their families. So we tried to do something

18:36Thea Mathias:different there as well. And you hear these beautiful stories about people who really didn't feel confident in the kitchen and the ease of using the products has helped them find the joy in cooking again. Yeah, I think that's so, so important. For me, when I learned to cook, it basically changed my life. I was an overweight teenager and then was like, OK, I'm going to eat better. I'm going to move more. I'm going to do all of this. And then as soon as I got actually into the cooking space, I was like, wow, you can do so much with food. And when I hear people like, oh i'm not that bothered about cooking or food i'm like how like it's such a core part you can't live without eating like at least if you can find a bit of joy when you're doing these things and for us like with what we do at packs like we're actually trying to make it easier for people so like the sofrito mix you don't have to do all the chopping if you don't want to do the chopping just get a bag of frozen sofrito chuck it in your pan great like that's part of the work done for you so i think it's finding those ways and and as you said sometimes people will put loads of effort into this like intricate recipe and they kind of watch it and go that's great or you can just see like oh actually if you get some beans and some amazing tomatoes and mix it with tahini and do this and it's like oh i've got all those things and i can do that it's making it accessible and i think when it's then in a gorgeous looking pan or like oven for example you're like wow this this is now fun to do so i think that's definitely something that our place definitely owns especially when you open your socials whether you're listening to this and you're like i think i know them like you'll have seen the pans like if you've seen any food content whatever market you will have seen the pounds.

20:03Thea Mathias:Now going right the way back for you, how did you get into this world when you were younger? What was your kind of career goal of going, when I grow up, I want to do this? When I was much younger, like when I was a kid, I wanted to be a vet because I had two dogs and I loved them. I felt like, you know, the logical conclusion was to be a vet. And then as I got older, I thought, gosh, I think quite a lot of being a vet is actually quite sad. I'm not sure that's the right path for me. And in my kind of mid-teens, as I was leaving school, I had this generic vision of just being some sort of like boss bitch.

20:38I had this generic vision of tottering around central London in a pencil skirt and high heels with my Starbucks and generally bossing people around. That was my vision for my career. And then I studied economics and management at uni. And in doing so, I really only knew that there were five jobs that you could do after that. I thought, genuinely, I thought that you could be a banker, an accountant, a lawyer, a management consultant, or a teacher. And I just had no idea there was anything other than that out there. I tried being a banker. That wasn't for me. I didn't want to be an accountant. I didn't want to be a lawyer.

21:18I didn't want to be a teacher. And so I ended up being a management consultant by process of elimination. And I loved it. Honestly, I joined McKinsey grad program and I made friends for life. I married one of them. So, you know, that was a useful start to my career. And you have this incredible exposure to lots of different things. I worked in hospitals, I worked on fighter jets, like all of these kinds of things that you would never normally have exposure to. It teaches you how to structure a problem because you're forever thinking about something new. So it teaches you really just the basics of how to break down an issue into its component parts and how to think about which of those component parts is the most important to work through.

22:04And then the next one, and then the next one. And it also teaches you how to influence people when you have no real authority. Like you are influencing teams that not only do you not manage, but they also don't like you and they don't want you to be there. And the ability to influence people in that setting is very useful. But I would say the other thing that I learned while I was there is that it is rarely the strategy that fails businesses. It is more often in the execution. Like most businesses have great ideas about what they could do to grow, about how they could improve performance, about what new markets to go over.

22:41It is rarely a lack of inspiration and strategy that fails a business. What is more complicated is once you have these ideas, how you prioritize them, how you resource them, and actually how you execute. And as a management consultant, you rarely get to see that side of things. That is actually less true now, I would say. This was now well over a decade ago. Now management consultancies actually do more of the implementation side. But whilst I was there, we didn't really do that. And so you would hand over this beautiful 100-page deck with this wonderful strategy, and then you would walk away.

23:13And you would never know if it worked or not. And you would also never know if it worked or not because it was the wrong strategy or because it wasn't executed properly. And so I wanted to do something where you actually like learn from your decisions. You realize if you made a mistake, you figure out whether or not it worked. And then I also had this idea that I wanted to do something good in the big sense of the word. And so I seconded from McKinsey to the cabinet office to work in the social investment and finance team. So I worked on a policy called the Mission-Led Business Review, which was essentially a review of policy that was intended to support businesses that were commercial businesses, like profit generating, profit motivated businesses, but that were also doing something good.

23:56They were working in the environment. They were reducing food waste. They were leveraging recycled products, whatever it might be. They were also turning some kind of social or environmental good. And it was so fun because I just spent my time running around talking to lots of these different kind of businesses about the problems that they face and the opportunities that they face. And it was also a wild time to be at the cabinet office. It was 2016. We voted for Brexit. Trump was elected as president. It was a wild time to find yourself at the center of government. And in doing this, I then took a role in operations at a fintech startup that was trying to do something good.