Eric Ryan

“I think it's still arguably my best tactic for developing new ideas is to be in a foreign market, ideally with a creative or a couple of creatives with you. So you can sketch as you go, cup of coffee in hand, incredibly jet lagged. Nobody can bother you becaus…”

“I never steal from our competition because then you're just a hack. That's embarrassing. I try to steal from as far away from what we're working on as possible.”

“And so I guess I'm going to take credit for it because nobody's told us they've done it first of really combining high design and deep sustainability.”

“When you're building a brand, if anybody else can line extend their way In, and compete against you. You're really going to struggle to compete against a big company unless you can create a great, you know, a huge lead.”

“We scaled it to a hundred million in four years.”

“People have made a fortune by selling too soon. It's better too soon than too late.”

“It was, you know, it was a 10 extra turn.”

“I did a startup with Serena Williams and just found if I wasn't the CEO in it, running it, Every day particularly with the dynamics it was not gonna work, so I made the decision just to wind it down.”

“I've moved much more into the venture investing space. And I joined Graycroft. We are launching a new one hundred fifty million dollar dedicated Consumer Fund. We just made our first two investments. So I've officially made the move from entrepreneur to invest…”

“Really trying to win on a product iteration is tough because it almost becomes more of an invention than building a brand.”

“Licensing, especially with retailers, is a great quick shortcut to really build, even though you're borrowing someone else's brand equity, but particularly for kids, bringing in kids' characters and being able to custom on top of that, I think would really get…”

“Yeah, so I was in London, you know, I love the British press, they're so skeptical, and she said, is it, you know, safe enough to drink? I was like, sure. So we both took a shot at the toilet bowl cleaner.”

“I still think there's no more valuable real estate in America than an end cap. At a target.”

“I still think of advertising as a tax on an unremarkable product. And the better you get the product, the packaging, and something that creates that immediate connection, then marketing is really just gravy and jet fuel to be able to accelerate that.”

“If you don't take outside capital, you don't need a true board, but having a group of people function as a board is It kind of creates these, like, tentpole moments and puts structure around the business to help you create a really clear rhythm to help you sca…”

“You can either go for control or financial win. Meaning if you want to just continue to have full control and really build this yourself, it's going to be a slower, longer build, but you can have control. If you want to really scale up, you're going to have to…”

“I think it's really, really hard long-term to build one product. I think you'd be in one category really well.”

“I was in London, you know, I love the British press, they're so skeptical, and she said, is it, you know, safe enough to drink? I was like, sure. So we both took a shot at the toilet bowl cleaner.”

“What you're looking for is what I call a sea of sameness. And so he put up this photo of the soap aisle and it was just like all a bunch of green bottles. It was like every bottle or every like house cleaner was green in a bottle and it looked exactly the same…”

“There's no such thing as low interest categories, just low interest brands.”

“We each put in 45,000 dollars.”

“The only way we're going to make this work is we had to get the mainstream into a green product, and we thought a lot of it as it's a Trojan horse for good. We had to put our green credentials on the back of the bottle and almost kind of hide them.”

“I always encourage entrepreneurs to take money from family because I think it's the best motivation to ensure that no matter how hard things get, you're going to find a path forward.”

“People don't buy sustainable products. They buy great products.”

“As a founder, you often look to partner with businesses with people who are similar to you, but what you need is someone who's the complete opposite of you to make a business successful.”

“Very simply, Adam's inside the bottle. He understood that the chemistry, the chemical engineering the sustainability behind it, and I was outside of the bottle, which was the design and the branding of it.”

“And you're doing this as a partnership, and I always tell people it's a lot like a marriage, but it's even harder because you can't have makeup sex. So you've got to find alternative ways through it.”

“The key for us was recognizing that it was way more important for the business That we have a constructive relationship than to get our own individual way”

“We did therapy together.”

“I'm a big proponent of that because it's what helps you understand this, like this situation that we just talked about, where when things get stressful, Eric talks a lot, and Adam shuts up. Right. And that's two different people responding in different ways th…”

“We're going to take credit for it, because we haven't found anybody who did it first, but really the first Eco Chic, a product that was high design and deep sustainability, which is really hard to do, and we were both insistent that it would have these qualiti…”

“I just started looking at the cleaning aisle and saw that it was such a big category, but a sea of sameness. Like, everything looked and smelled the same. The brands were pretty dated, and so that was kind of the clue of, dig here.”

“There's no such thing as low-interest categories, just low-interest brands.”

“We had friends who are raising forty million dollars on forty-page business plans and bragging about a million dollar per page for a raise or doing these lavish launch parties, which seems so ridiculous now to spend funds on a launch party.”

“We didn't have a lot of, you know, money to do custom tooling, and so I started looking for stock bottles, couldn't find anything I really liked. So I had this camping water bottle from Norway that I had found. Just a really simple kind of bullet design with t…”

“We paid, we ran the business out of pocket for about two years.”

“We each put in 45,000 dollars.”

“And it was the best training, because we didn't know how to sell, and you had 30 seconds to pitch. And so it really helped you learn how to sell the product.”

“We didn't have a customer service number, so my cell phone was on the back of every bottle”

“I always encourage entrepreneurs to Take money from family, because I think it's the best motivation to ensure that no matter how hard things get, you're going to find a path forward.”

“And it was a toilet bowl cleaner. And so we both took a shot at the toilet bowl cleaner”