Consumer Packaged Goods

“It has gotten a lot harder to sell and sell for a figure that you're happy with. Like you said, it used to be profitable. Who cares? As long as you're showing fast growth. And now it's different. It's a lot harder to sell your company now.”

“The beauty of that was we're now not in charge of the merchandising. Like, you know, these, you know what a Cheerio is, you know, if you want it, you know, a Ziploc bag. So we essentially just focused on the fulfillment, laugh-mouth delivery and the customer e…”

“Most of the time, at least at this point, anybody that's succeeding is typically doing CPG sales anyway. But CPG strictly would be, you know, consumer packaged goods through retail, like in-store environment, and then they would say e-com is the other side of …”

“I do think that there's a balance between growth and profitability, and I think, you know, the pendulum used to be too far one way, right, which was grow at all costs, but then it swung the other way, and then what happens is you can't, it's too hard for a cha…”

“What is the number one thing that a high margin correlates to in CPG? It's the speed at which the ingredient acts on you. So that dopamine cycle, how quickly something occurs, determines your brand affinity. And so when something has a very quick response, you…”

“It's like a 30% gross profit. So if you sell a box of meat for a hundred bucks, you make 30 dollars on it after you've shipped it and credit card fees and all that. So 30% gross profit, basically 10% to operate the place. So salaries, technology, rent, et cete…”

“I say, actually, that the death of religion is the thesis for CPG and consumer brand investors today. And you're like, what? Thesis? Because we've shifted cult-like worshipping from God, Buddha, and these deus figures to High Rocks and CrossFit and Taylor Swif…”

“CPG sucks. It's the worst business in the world.”

“One of the easiest hacks that What you can do if you want to be successful in CPG is take something that people are already consuming, source it better, improve the formulation, and then put it back out, right?”

“I think that there's probably a lot of opportunity in doing this style branding for older adults, not young females.”

“There's probably a hundred million dollar startup idea in the, I want to create V zero for CPG. Like that in itself, I think is a huge opportunity for someone to run with as a startup idea.”

“Brands built prior to that era, especially in non-tech categories, so think CPG, beauty, retail, et cetera still can flourish. In fact, like What's old is new again.”

“Once we realized that the key to consumer packaged goods is staying in stock on the shelf, and that that's more important than anything, because if you're not there, they can't buy it.”

“Most of the research that's been done in marketing, like when I went to marketing school, it was so disappointing. All of the research is done on consumer packaged goods. All of it.”

“In 20, 24, the hardest part is authenticity of our brand and connecting with the demo. Yeah, that is the hardest part. Making products is easy. Like you just go to fucking China and press four buttons. You have your like normal CPG with nice branding.”

“It's easy to say, like, build the media machine that delivers either a product, a CPG, like you're saying, or a service of some kind, but connecting those two is a very rare thing that people pull off.”

“I still would never even think about trying to compete with the big guys in the space. Right. It just, it doesn't work. And I would, we would, they would bleed us to death. Like it just wouldn't work. But the reason we've been successful is because we serve an…”

“I think you're just going to start to see a lot of creators go the software route over Traditionally what they've been going for, which is the CPG route.”

“Even if we got to, you know, huge market shares everywhere, like there's going to be some cap on our growth and shave. And so if we thought about it, we thought, Hey, like, you know, if we could increase our addressable market, not just to kind of men's groomi…”

“You can actually use the product if great to celebritize yourself and then bring out an audience that's really committed to seeing your growth.”

“The problem with saturation is that by definition, saturation is an uninnovated market. And to bring true innovation to market, you almost are never going to be able to show up to a co manufacturer and have that happen regardless of what you're building.”

“They won't even look at reproducing a manufacturing line internally unless they have proof points of three hundred million dollars a year of revenue.”

“In CPG, there's not one founder led top 10 company in the publicly traded ranks.”

“Something like half to two thirds of all the growth in CPG in the last 10 years has come from small brands, new brands”

“When you're in the store, you have less than a second to grab someone's attention. I think the best way to do that is to create a good package. And there's a saying that your package is your product. It's not what you sell in the bag, it's the bag itself, beca…”

“Every single major big box retailer has basically declared a net zero emission strategy in the next five to 10 years. Not a single company On the CPG side has actually any plans to do anything meaningful anywhere near 2030, 2045, 20 50.”

“When you're starting out in this industry, you have to understand that it's run by behemoths feeding other behemoths. And so the supply chain, the, how they're bonused, they're not incentivized to really sell each's to people. It's just doesn't move the needle…”

“We have a good product market fit in the marketplace segment, but we still need to finalize, kind of make sure we have a good product market fit on the brand and CPG space.”

“As we say, big CPG is always looking backwards. They're looking at categories and how they have performed. These entrepreneurs are really looking forward, and I think they're discovering these new niches in these very large categories that can be large over ti…”

“They're not very good at nurturing smaller entrepreneurial brands and really see the acquisition of these brands. As a real opportunity for them to generate top-line growth.”

“So, 15 years ago, when they would buy a brand, they would basically strip out it from the company and pop it into their system, and the brand would probably go and die.”

“So I still think we're in the midpoint at best. One is, I think we're seeing more people get onto that journey than ever before, and I think that's what really scares CPG”

“There will be more of them, but they will get to a smaller level. So what I mean is it lasts 10 or 15 years, the brands that won, Chobani, et cetera, you can build multi-billion dollar businesses. I'm skeptical if that's true in CPG going forward.”

“In CPG specifically, there will be quantitative VC firms... We think that that is possible in some industries in the private markets. We don't think it's possible in tech.”

“There's companies that are grossing 152 hundred million dollars and aren't profitable and are selling at five X for a billion dollars.”