Building a Brand in a Niche Market - Restart CBD | EP. #56

On this 56th episode of The E-Comm Show, our host and BlueTuskr CEO Andrew Maff is with Shayda Torabi CEO and co-founder of Restart CBD, a Texas' premier cannabis brand and the host of the popular cannabis and marketing podcast To Be Blunt. With Shayda’s expertise in marketing and technology, she has been helping consumers to navigate the cannabis industry.

Tune in to this episode of The E-Comm Show as Shayda shares about her experience in cannabis marketing and how to navigate hurdles in state laws and policies as a cannabis company.

If you enjoyed the show, please be sure to rate, review, and of course, SUBSCRIBE! 

Have an e-commerce marketing question you'd like Andrew to cover in an upcoming episode? Email: hello@theecommshow.com

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Building a Brand in a Niche Market - Restart CBD

SPEAKER

Andrew Maff and Shayda Torabi

CONNECT WITH OUR HOST: AndrewMaff.com  |  Twitter: @AndrewMaff | LinkedIn: @AndrewMaff

Shayda Torabi

Shayda Torabi is the Co-Founder and CEO of RESTART CBD, Texas' premier cannabis brand. Shayda is also the host of the popular cannabis and marketing podcast To Be Blunt, interviewing leading brands and marketers on their strategies for success. She is passionate about helping build great consumer brands and leverages her background in marketing and technology to help navigate the cannabis industry connecting the consumer to high-quality cannabis products and education @theshaydatorabi.

Transcript:

00:00

I lean into that content and make it put out there and really just capitalizing on the opportunity of these free platforms as difficult as they are because they're not without, you know difficulty. But you learn to play the game smarter with every piece of content you put out there.

00:15

Hey Everyone; this is Nezar Akeel of Max Pro. Hi, I'm Linda, and I'm Paul, and we're Love and Pebble.

00:23

 Hi this is Lopa Van Der Mersch from RASA. You're listening to, and you're listening, and you are listening to The E-Comm Show. Welcome to The E-Comm Show, presented by BlueTuskr, the number one place to hear the inside scoop from other ecommerce experts. They share their secrets on how they scaled their business and are now living the dream. Now, here's your host, Andrew Maff.

00:56

Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of The E-Comm Show. I am super excited to introduce you to Shayda Torabi of Restarts CBD Shayda. How are you doing? You're right about a good show.

01:07

I am so excited to be here. I love e-commerce. I love marketing. And I love talking about our business and how we've grown it and so I'm excited to dive into those topics with you today.

01:17

I am I say this at the start of every episode where I'm always like, Oh, I'm so excited for so and so to be on the show. And I know that it starts to lose its luster. But I am really excited to have you on the show. Because you have your own podcast, which is amazing that we're gonna get into, which means talking with you is going to be a lot more fun than it can be with others. And then also outside of that, you're in a restricted brand, which is a whole different beast and super fun to talk about because you gotta get real creative with that kind of stuff. So I would love to do the stereotypical give you a minute here to pretend that no one knows who you are and kind of give him a little bit of insight about yourself and restart.

01:54

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for the opportunity to be here. So my name is shaida I'm based in Austin, Texas. If you're familiar with cannabis laws across the United States, you might know that Texas does not have access to recreational adult-use marijuana, and I know, a precursor that because I do operate in the cannabis space, I own restart CBD. So to kind of delineate, you know, between the two, our business, our brand is built all around him. And hemp is classified at a federal level of less than point 3% Delta nine THC, and it was legalized at a federal level in 2018 with the Farm Bill, and then Texas legalized following in 2019 with one of our house bills, and you kind of saw that sweep across the nation a lot of states you know, implemented hemp laws that opened up this whole line of business for operators like myself to sell hemp products specifically, you know, when we first launched it was CBD based which is a cannabinoid that is non-psychotropic now the market has evolved opened up you know, kind of the high-level hemp and marijuana while they have different terms and certainly different characteristics that both a cannabis plant so they have a lot of similarities as well. So CBD, for example, is present in both marijuana and hemp, as well as THC, which is the cannabinoid that makes you high. So again, I sell products that are hemp-derived, they are federally legal under the 2018 farm bill, and we got into the industry because, one, I love cannabis, I love that I get to work in an industry that I get to embrace so publicly and have the support of my family and my my, my significant other and just you know getting to live kind of this out loud truth about cannabis, I love to be a professional D stigmatizing it obviously being able to have conversations like this highlighting the pros and the cons of the industry as its evolving, but also because it's helped impact my own healing and recovery journey. So back in 2015, I was hit by a vehicle as a pedestrian, fractured my pelvis in two places, and was thrust into traditional, you know, Western medicine and nothing against Western medicine. I think it certainly has its time in place depending on, you know, what diagnosis you're being dealt or what you're trying to navigate, what resources you have access to, and so I did Western medicine, but very, you know, early in my recovery probably eight months, and I say early because now the accidents what you know, six, seven years later and I still navigate chronic pain daily, but cannabis CBD, in particular, that was so transformative for me. My mother introduced it to me as a component of my healing journey. And as a family, we kind of never looked back, and so it was that journey of us going into exploring education, understanding doses, understanding, you know, CBD versus THC, the science behind these, these plants and really putting our heads together to bring our product to market. So restart CBD is a four-year-old brand. We started as an E-commerce business first, which I'll touch on a little bit too. You know why we started ecommerce first. Prior to getting into the industry. I came from technology and platform, so I actually have a background in managed WordPress hosting super unsexy but maybe familiar to your audience, you know, so I worked for One of the leading hosting companies, they're called WP Engine. They really took me on a sky-high rocket journey. I was employee 13, was with them for six years, watched the business scale to 700 employees had a marketing position where multiple marketing hats. But being a platform that is built on WordPress, WordPress has a huge opportunity with E-commerce WooCommerce being, you know, that the bolting integration, I just had this front-row seat to watch how people were leveraging the internet, to build businesses and to bring their ideas and products and communities online. And so when we were getting ready to launch restart with this background in WordPress, knowing that cannabis is so tumultuous with banking and, you know, different terms of service censorship on certain social media platforms, and I'm sure we'll get into some of those other you know, nuances, I have certain censorship around certain email marketing platforms I can't and can't use. So those all kind of wrapped up together, you know, made me look at my background and say, Okay, well, WordPress is open source; at least I can kind of start building my house upon what I know. And so I don't think any platform is perfect out there. But we are a WordPress open-source-based brand. And yeah, we celebrated four years in business last August, and now we're getting into the holiday season. So so looking forward to continuing you know, to dive into a little bit more about our business, but that's kind of me in a nutshell.

06:24

Nice. Congratulations on your four-year anniversary. So you started off the conversation, and you got so deep into like laws and when stuff was approved, and all that stuff. It's amazing to me when I have a conversation with an E-commerce seller that's in a restricted brand, the knowledge they have of their product line and their industry. And then when I talk to someone who likes to sell clothes, they're like, Yeah, I sell it on Facebook, and people buy it. Okay, cool, like a way to know your stuff, like so you, you know it inside and out, which is awesome. It's obvious you have to. So, for a brand like yours, wildly complicated, as you mentioned, like, you know, there are email marketing platforms that you can't do anything on. There are hosting platforms that won't even let you be on there. I think I believe Shopify is also one of them, where you just can't even sell the product on Shopify. There, I think almost every advertising platform doesn't really allow you to do much of anything. How did you get from, you know, starting off to clearing, you know, that first, like, seven-figure hurdle that everyone struggles with within four years when you can't really work with all the stuff that most people have the ability to work with?

07:37

Yeah, man, what a, like a tough position to be in; I appreciate a little bit of, you know, the empowerment, but it's a little bit, you know, you learn by doing so, I think, for us to kind of set the stage, we entered the market in a really particular time I say peculiar, because to the outside we're looking in it was like, Right Place Right Time. And I definitely think there's a little bit of that, you know, the excitement of, just like I mentioned, the timing of the Farm Bill, you know, passing hemp at a federal level in 2018. We launched our brand right before, so that was around December 2018. We launched in August 2018. So it wasn't that our industry was illegal. It just didn't have, you know, parameters and guidelines, right? And so, I think in those early months, we really were flying by the seat of our pants because it wasn't that it was like a big X like, oh, you can't go down this path, or oh, you can't go down that hallway. We learned by doing, and so I mean, we would, you know, try to be on Facebook, we would try to use Pay Pal, and maybe those would last for a couple of months. I mean, you know, Facebook, trying to link our products to sell through these Instagram and social media channels and trying to excuse me set up certain, you know, just like communications to our customers, and we would go to pop-up events and use Pay Pal. And those worked until they didn't. And so I think that's where we really started honing in on, Okay, well, I can't do that. I am illegally not allowed to do that. But that's a question mark. Maybe I'll, like, you know, run it until I can't anymore. And so I think just, you know, kind of like you alluded to, you really have to understand this industry. And I think that I've prided myself on kind of a couple of things. One, I never want to be the smartest person in a room. I think that is like just the death of an entrepreneur; you always want to have a posture of learning. And so, especially in our industry, when we were looking at what other people are doing? How were other people marketing? There was really nobody to look at, right? There was maybe Charlotte's Web if you're familiar with the CBD space, kind of being one of the forefront leaders really pushing boundaries. But there weren't, you know, a dozen brands that I could go say, Well, what are they doing on social media? What does their website look like? You know, how was their messaging? We had to take cues from other industries. So looking at supplements, looking at a little bit of how pharmaceutical brands remarket themselves. And so we did a lot of what I call self-regulating. And so I would say that's kind of, you know, just like table stakes for us. Yes, there are certain platforms we couldn't Beyond, and there are certain solutions or technologies that we couldn't leverage. But that is kind of, you know, the doors shut. So we're going to climb through a window. On the other side of it, I would say what gave us a lot of success. Like I mentioned in the introduction, you know, coming from WordPress, I, in that industry, really leaned into my personal brand. So during WordPress and during WP Engine, I was going to different conferences and trade shows. And I kind of had a co-worker who tapped me on the shoulder one day and basically said, Hey, you come to these events, you should start public speaking at these events, and I thought me, you know, impostor syndrome, what do I have to say, and over time that started eroding. And so when I was probably three years into my six-year tenure at WP Engine, I started public speaking, I started building my own personal Instagram channel, I started building this personal brand that I, you know, now kind of wrap up in a nice little bow, and have all these opportunities like this podcast, I always love to highlight, you know, people think, Oh, she's telling her story. I'm like, Yes, this is marketing. This is how I'm getting my business out there. And some of those early months, that first year, year and a half, especially before COVID, we really leaned into our personal brand. So I say we, me and my middle sister, there's three of us who are sister on brand, my middle sister is also I'm going to use no air quotes for the listeners, a content creator, also, you know, maybe known as an influencer. And so we had built these personal profiles, I was a food blogger, and she was a fitness influencer. And so we had built these relationships. And we had built this equity of being experts and thought leaders on these topics, that when we sort of leaning into the CBD and cannabis space, it didn't happen overnight, right? It's not like I showed up in the industry. And I'm like, all of a sudden, I'm gonna talk about cannabis marketing. But I'm a really big believer, you know, you're an expert, the moment you say you're an expert, and that's not to dilute or inflate knowledge, right, I definitely think you need to, like, understand and educate yourself. But we really just leaned into this opportunity of making content. So we would put things on our Instagrams that was our personal Instagrams talking about these products that we were finding relief with. And really resonating then with our local community here in Austin, that I would say, that's really what gave us a leg up over competition over navigating some of these, you know, hurdles that other businesses might have been running into. Because, you know, for better or worse, I'm a big believer as well in leaning into your strengths. And so I get asked this question a lot, you know, who does your marketing and, you know, obviously, you know, we're on this podcast, we are a client of yours, I don't do everything. I don't do the SEO, I don't pretend to do every component. But I do a lot of it; we do a lot of it, we do most of our content creation in-house, I mean, recording videos, doing our own podcast, I mean, you know, public speaking, making all of our graphics for our social media for our website, that all have, you know, rolled into how we've successfully I believe, found a niche to relate to our target audience, and build credibility for ourselves as a brand that has allowed us just to kind of like, you know, inch inch inch up. And so by no means are we the leader, but I would say for sure, especially coming from Texas, you know, our home state, my goal is to see my state have better cannabis laws. And this is a way that I can lean into that conversation. So that was kind of a long-winded answer and saying, you know, there are definitely things you can't do. But then there's a lot of stuff that it's just, you know, my second nature coming from a marketing background, I like using the tools at my fingertips. And kind of final tip with that note, I think people think, you know, I gotta get the fanciest camera, I gotta get the best sound system. If you looked around my office, you would see, you know, I've got probably like three tripods sitting around right now, I have now invested in better equipment, but don't let great be the enemy of good. And so, in those early days, it was just literally putting content out there and seeing what sticks. Right now. We're reviving our YouTube channel; we see when we post YouTube content that directly impacts our sales. And so being able to lean into that content and make it put it out there, and really just capitalizing on the opportunity of these free platforms as difficult as they are because they're not without difficulty. But you learn to play the game smarter with every piece of content you put out there.

14:09

Yeah, I completely agree. YouTube is a wildly underutilized platform, especially for E-commerce sellers. I find so many people just sleep on that, and I never really understand why. But I digress. One of the things I know I wanted to ask you because, in this industry specifically, the big question that I always hear from everyone that I have interviewed in this in, you know, in CBD or hemp or, you know, even firearms and all of them anything on the restricted side, well, specifically CBD marijuana side of things. Everyone wants to know, down the line, who's going to be, you know, the Coca-Cola or the McDonalds of hemp of CBD of marijuana, like who's going to own it once? It's like nationwide because we'll eventually get there, I'm sure. So what's the goal? As you continue to grow? How do you want to position yourselves as you No kind of in this space?

15:01

Yeah, that's such a loaded question, to be candid, you know, because I spend so much time in the industry. As you mentioned in the beginning, I have my own podcast I talk about, specifically cannabis marketing. I think a discernment for the listeners, I made a conscious choice to make my podcast B to B versus B to C. So I don't speak to my consumer with my podcast; I speak directly to my industry at my industry, about my industry. And that's been both a blessing and a curse. It's brought me really back into reality. And the way, you know, to give you kind of like a little snapshot without, you know, offending anybody. We don't know how the effing Hell if I can, you know, kind of cuss on the podcast, how a nation is going to go, right. And so I think when I was a consumer, I thought, oh, you know, vote the person, and they're gonna flip a switch, and we're gonna get marijuana for everybody. And that's just not the reality. I think, especially in light of, you know, the President's recent announcement, it's a lot of show to be candid. And that's not really how policy gets implemented on one end. And that's also not how you're going to actually see legalization rollout. So to back up from that, you know, being a Texas-based business, like I mentioned, my state does not have access to cannabis full on; we have a very baby medical marijuana program. But again, looking at politics, looking at policy, looking at legislation, I take cues from other industries. So I look at how states like California have rolled out recreational adult-use marijuana, I look at how states like Florida have rolled out medical marijuana, I look at how states like Oklahoma have made a free for all. So to kind of talk about those three states giving, you know, brief examples. California is one of the first to legalize their state is problematic. I interview a lot of people in California with these big banner brand names, and they're struggling just as much as the small mom-and-pop shop guys. It is a race to the bottom; you have to realize every state right now is setting up licensing differently. Licensing means operator licenses, cultivation licenses, and retail licenses. And so California being kind of the epitome of a market, it's not that the market isn't successful. It's just the state is hemorrhaging a lot of money. These businesses are hemorrhaging money because of the tax laws and other things that are stunting the growth of that industry. Then you look at a state like Florida, you know, I think very similar to Texas, they're limited licensure. So to operate in their medical-only market right now. There are only 13 licenses; you have to grow, extract, manufacture, process and sell. So in our world, that's called vertical integration; you have to have a lot of money to be vertically integrated, in fun fact. Florida licenses require you to have owned a nursery for 30 years prior to qualifying for a medical marijuana license in the state of Florida. So that's Florida, any of Oklahoma free for fucking all, anybody could get a license. It was a wild wild west; Oklahoma is not very popular, sorry, to anybody from Oklahoma. There are just not that many people there, right? But yet, here's all this surplus, I mean, 6000 8000 plus licenses. I have brands, friends, brands in that state that are failing, and they are disastrous, and they are seeking some sort of reprieve. And so I share that again, not to be a Debbie Downer, but just a realist of I, again, I'm a Texan. I want my state to legalizing it, and I want to play a very active role. I do not know if I will get a license realistically that doesn't mean I'm not advocating or fighting for better licensing in my state. In fact, I sit on the leading nonprofit advocacy board called the Texas hemp coalition. I was just in DC doing lobbying work for him at a federal level. We're getting ready for our legislative session kicking in January 2023. I will play a very proactive role in helping to ensure that the legislation is fair for our state operators, but with that said, it's politics, and so at the end of the day, if my state decides to pull a Florida and say up limited licensure and oh you got to have owned an apple orchard for 50 years I'm automatically deselected out of that. That's not to say that it could open up eventually. But you know, kind of looking at the near term is just not realistic. And so I think for me, very passionate about building restart, want to take it as far as we can go, but the reality also of present-day operations from a hemp perspective, our laws are constantly evolving too quick laws in Texas that we're navigating that might be you know, familiar to your listeners. Delta eight THC, a very popular hemp-derived cannabinoid. Some argue we only have it because we don't have access to full Delta nine THC. It's very murky. There are a lot of opinions, but essentially the state of Texas is dealing with it as other states have dealt with it. Colorado, I believe last year made it illegal in their state. And so we anticipate some of that to come, you know, being brought up in our next year's legislative session because it's already being dealt with right now in some lawsuits. And then Texas most recently decided to ban the manufacturing and process of smokable hemp products. So as a retailer, I'm allowed to grow Oh, hemp-based products to smoke. So flower pre-roll cartridges, I'm allowed to sell you those products through my website, e-commerce, and in retail, but I'm not allowed to manufacture processes products in Texas as of June of 2022. So I can no longer put a label, I cannot put it in a, I cannot take the flour and put it in packaging that has manufacturing and processing. So those are very real roadblocks, that as business owners and operators, again, kind of to your, your, your illusion with the gentleman or the person selling a t-shirt, I put a T-shirt online and I make it cool saying and, you know, I gotta make sure that this graphic T is the price that I can make a good, you know, margin and sell to my consumer who maybe likes the same talking points that I like, mine's a little bit more complex, I have to obviously have a good ecommerce setup, I have to have a good integration flow, gotta have good marketing, but then the under, you know, tone of all of that is what legally can I sell or can't I sell at any given moment. And so those are just, you know, realities of me as a business operator, I wish I'm like, Oh, I'm building my business for 20 years, you know if the laws change in three to five, that might be a different business. And so we'll have to pivot, which I think we've been doing successfully the last four years. So I have no, no fear that we won't continue to pivot and try to navigate if you can't tell; I'm really passionate about this stuff. And so I'm determined to be a part of the industry. And really, my goal is to help reshape my home state's views on cannabis and hopefully help see our state have better policies.

21:26

Yeah, and I definitely find you clearly have a passion for your industry; I do find that not to belittle it in any way. But I mean, like in your industry, specifically, everyone is so wildly passionate about it. And honestly, in my opinion, I think you have to be because you have to pivot, like or at least, whether you want to use the word pivot or adjust what you got to do something like every other year, at a minimum, that's not including like factoring and inflation and supply chain issues, and then potential recession and all this stuff that's happening that most people most ecommerce sellers have to deal with, you also have to deal with the fact that the laws change every time someone sneezes the wrong way, which is just such a pain. So a lot of credit for being

22:11

engaging. Yeah, so you have to kind of enjoy the chaos, I think, right?

22:15

Yeah, exactly. What, um, so a little bit back to the E-commerce site, specifically, what is like one of the top channels that are bringing in most of your sales that you kind of seems to be focusing on?

22:28

Yeah, so I'd say from an E-commerce perspective, I think leaning into for us, our community is so important, right? I think you look at the stack of returning customers versus attracting new customers. And so, for us, we really do want to reward people who have been loyal to us. And so trying to kind of, like, have this community aspect about it. And kind of going back to a point I was making earlier, you know, we try to do everything in-house as much as we can, but also realized, like when we get exhausted, or when we have, you know, fail points where we just aren't being as effective as we could be. And so I would say email marketing has been a really big driver for us just being able to have that touch point with our current customers, right? So being able to introduce them to educational talking points, being able to keep them abreast with some of these policy and legislation changes, being able to introduce new products to them, or, you know, highlight what's going on in our world from a, you know, business perspective, I think those are kind of like table stakes, but we weren't doing the best job with it the first couple years, which is maybe to our detriment, but we learned very quickly, you know, like, my sister was kind of running email marketing. And so she, I would say, she did a newsletter, you know, once a month, but there wasn't like any other communication going out. And so now we've hired an email marketing agency, they're like, on the dial, they're like constantly creating content. But I would say that is, you know, half the coin, right? Because if you don't have content for email marketing, then to be blasting out sales or new products is kind of regurgitating the same thing. So email marketing, I would say, has been a huge driver, but it's a constant investment for us just to make sure that we are delivering information that is a part of that customer journey, right? Whether it's a customer who has been with us for a while and who wants to just like stay abreast, like I said, on what's going on in the industry or new products that we're releasing, or then addressing, you know, new customers into our ecosystem. So obviously, capturing people's emails and doing interesting creative things. You know, we recently put a quiz on our website; I saw another business on how to quiz, you know, find your CBD style. And I was like, let me just test it out. And so put it on the website. It's twofold; the right one, I'm capturing people's emails, I'm capturing people's preferences. I get to see, you know, what products you are looking for. What are you interested in? Full disclosure, I haven't done anything with that information yet. So it's not like I'm the perfect business owner marketer sitting here being like everything is, you know, optimized for conversion, but I thought that was a really interesting thing. We turned it on, and I saw that we had, you know, over 200 emails being collected in the forms, maybe being up for two months. So I don't know, you know, 60 days 200 emails for the pretty low-hanging activity of something that I have to turn on. So I think email marketing, just to reiterate, for us has been a really big driver and something that we really want to continue investing in as that component of, you know, someone hitting our website wanting to engage with us making a purchase or being curious about a purchase. And then what are those touch points of communication they're going to receive from our brand as a follow up?

25:30

Nice. Yeah, I've heard we've, we've done some testing with those quizzes and stuff. And if you have a large enough product line or a complicated enough product line, those quizzes can be game changers there because, at a bare minimum, they're growing your list at a really low CPA for the most part. It's there.

25:47

Exactly. Yeah, it's been fun testing it. I will say maybe it's the plague of WordPress, but there's always some issue with, like, some products not actually showing up on, you know, the output of the quiz, so just yesterday, I was like, shit, I gotta go through and make sure all my links are linking to the right things, you know, do you have the right attributes but it's been fun to just try something new and see it performs so well for us.

26:10

Yeah. Shane, I really appreciate having you on the show. I obviously don't want to take up too much of your time. You're really busy. But the usual, I'd love to give you an opportunity here. Let everyone else know where they can find out more about you. And, of course, your podcasts. Let everyone know about that too.

26:23

Yeah, thank you so much. So if you want to shop CBD, we're at restart cbd.com. If you want to be educated, I would say our main channels right now are that we're really investing in our Instagram and YouTube. And my podcast is to be blunt, to be blunt pod.com, where I like to talk about cannabis and marketing and obviously a lot more of these topics in depth. But yeah, thanks for having me on the show. I obviously love ecommerce as an opportunity for a business, especially able to reach so many people and just never pictured a day when I was able to sell cannabis online and even to like to be somebody doing it, so I very much feel grateful that we're pioneering in this industry and really learning as we go. So the best is certainly yet to come.

27:06

Love it. Thank you so much for being on the show. Obviously, everyone that tuned in, please do the usual rate review, subscribe, and all that fun stuff on whichever platform you prefer, or head over to ecommshow.com to check out all the other episodes. If not, either way. We'll see you all next time. Have a good one.

27:20

Thanks. Thank you for tuning in to The E-Comm Show head over to ecommshow.com to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform or on the BlueTuskr YouTube channel. The E-Comm Show is brought to you by BlueTuskr, a full-service digital marketing company specifically for E-commerce sellers looking to accelerate their growth. Go to BlueTuskr.com Now for more information. Make sure to tune in next week for another amazing episode of The E-Comm Show.