On this 61st episode of The E-Comm Show, our host and BlueTuskr CEO Andrew Maff is with Stacey Grace, CEO and co-founder of Kent, a plastic-free, landfill-free, organic, and compostable end-of-life basics brand.
From biodegradable innovations and promoting sustainable fashion to marketing strategies and going on Shark Tank, here is the full episode to Kent’s journey as a successful and continuously growing sustainable fashion brand.
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Andrew Maff and Stacy Grace
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Stacy Grace
Stacy Grace is the founder of KENT, the compostable underwear brand that’s on a mission to help save the planet, one supernatural basic at a time. A Canadian living in LA, Stacy started her career in sustainable business consulting across apparel, consumer goods, and entertainment in North America, the UK, and Europe and started KENT after being frustrated with her underwear drawer filled with scratchy, unbreathable, and uncomfortable synthetics.
Transcript:
00:00
I think the biggest challenge with starting an apparel brand or any product-based business is building the product itself.
00:11
Hey everyone this is Nezar Akeel of Max Pro. Hi, I'm Linda, and I'm Paul, and we're Love and Pebble. Hi this is Lopa Van Der Mersch from RASA you're listening to and you're listening
00:23
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 where they share their secrets on how they scaled their businesses and are now living the dream. Now, here's your host, Andrew Maff.
00:52
Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of The E-Comm Show. I'm your host, Andrew Maff. And today, I'm joined by the amazing Stacey Grace of Kent. Stacy, how're you doing? Are you ready for a good show?
01:02
Yes, thank you so much for having me.
01:05
Super excited to have you on the show. You are definitely the stuff you guys have done and incredibly impressive, super excited to get into it. There's also some crazy stuff with a lot of Shark Tank people on the show. But you've got some interesting stories around the episode you were on. But we'll get to that I would love to do the normal thing here and give you a minute to kind of tell everyone a little bit about yourself about Kent and we can start from there.
01:30
Cool. So I'm Stacy, I'm the co-founder and CEO of Kent. We're a plastic free landfill-free, organic, and fully compostable end-of-life basics brand. And essentially, why composting is such a cool way to think about end-of-life options for clothes that would otherwise end up in a landfill. So things like underwear, bras socks, that don't have a clear end-of-life alternative, and you can't donate or resell them. So we offer the option to what we call for your underwear, I plant your pants, so you can literally throw them in the compost, they'll turn into soil, my end of life. And composting is something that I just grew up with. I am from Toronto, Canada, and curbside composting was just the norm. And thinking about how when something is so natural and made from natural materials like plants, then it can return back to nature. And that's kind of the ethos about all of our products. And where we're headed.
02:45
Beautiful. How did you come up with this idea?
02:48
Well, I studied sustainability and fashion about 10 years ago in the UK and realize that one category and fashion that really hadn't been tackled was apparel. And particularly in women's underwear. Synthetics like nylon spandex elastane are so overused in that category. And I myself want to find 100% natural options. And I talked to my friends, they want the same thing. And we just couldn't find it didn't exist. So after many years of talking to women, and now men about their underwear. We did a lot of r&d and just figured kind of developed this concept and discovered that a lot of other people in the world are looking for the same thing. So it's been an idea in the making for quite a while. But we eventually put like feet to the fire a couple of years ago.
03:49
Nice. So obviously you started this business. This is not only just a new category, but it's also in apparel, which is one of the hardest to get into to differentiate yourself. Obviously, your big differentiators are pretty self-explanatory. But did you have any trouble in the beginning starting to get it to catch on?
04:15
I think the biggest challenge with starting an apparel brand or any product-based business is building the product itself. So not so much cat I mean catching on in terms of the nature of DTC business has changed, especially over the last year with the introduction of iOS updates and we know all of that with Facebook ads so we never wanted to rely on advertising as our sole means to grow the business. So we have grown luckily organically to date for the most part through word-of-mouth referrals. Some organic press coverage. but we also have decided to partner with a few strategic wholesale brands or wholesalers, like maid well, and Nordstrom to get our name out even further and get in front of new audiences. So I think by doing that it's helped our idea to catch on and resonate with the right people but definitely hasn't been. Yeah, relying on advertising, where that's been a hurdle I know for a lot of brands.
05:29
Yeah. So are you looking to get more into retail? Are you trying to maintain it a little bit more on the DTC side?
05:38
Definitely focus more on DTC, though, we have Yeah, a couple of strategic partners where we feel the fit is really great. And it allows us to expand our distribution beyond our current set. That's not to say in the future, we couldn't go deeper in there, but focus majority DTC with a couple of other Yeah, wholesale partners.
06:01
What has so on the DTC side? What has been like kind of the main focus of a marketing strategy? Because obviously, you just mentioned Facebook ads and the iOS change and all that fun stuff. But has that been the main focus? Are you doing more like influencer marketing or affiliate marketing? That's what's kind of been your approach.
06:18
Affiliate marketing has been really great for us. So we've worked with a ton of great outlets, from refinery 29 to smaller, more boutique, blogger, and influencer types. And recently, we have gone into influencer marketing, which has been really great for us from, I'd say less from a consumer acquisition standpoint, but more from a consumer awareness perspective. And also, having our story and the concept of composable clothing being told by a variety of voices in different ways is really exciting for us, because it gives us almost a chance to test through these individuals who are really excited about our product, different types of messaging and understand like, what's working what's resonating with their community, and then we can tap it into ours. So affiliate marketing, influencers, and email marketing have just been really beneficial for us.
07:18
The influencer marketing side doesn't really shock me that you say that, because it's one of those things I always find, especially when you're first starting off a business that it tends to be a great way to get started simply because you if you don't have that much brand recognition yet, or you don't have a lot of reviews, or anything along those lines, you kind of come off bias saying like, hey, we have the best product you should buy, like anyone can make a really cool ad and run it. So when you let other people tell your story and your message for you, it's always really interesting to see what those people and their followers are saying to them, as opposed to what they might be saying to you, which sometimes is not a lot. What uh, what kind of like influencers? Have you been focused on? Are you doing kinda like the fashion approach? Are you doing just kind of more of a general celebrity or something along those lines?
08:08
We're focused on the micro and nano influencers and fashion lifestyle with predominantly a focus on sustainability, eco-consciousness, and Healthy Living wellness, because we know that that's the type of customer that really gets excited about our brand and our products. And it is really cool, as you say, to read the comments and hear what their communities are saying like, Oh my God, you can plant your underwear. That's so cool. And like I never knew this existed. And so that's kind of the conversation, or the reach that we want to have is this like very cool factor that if someone genuinely finds our product and our brand exciting, then most likely their community will too. So it's very fun to see that.
08:59
So you mentioned you're from Canada, you're in LA now I believe, correct? Yes. Los Angeles. Nice. So you mentioned composting in Canada is more of an everyday thing than it is here in the States.
09:12
That's right is catching on in the US. In Los Angeles. It's not quite curbside yet, but it is transitioning that way. And there are a lot of municipalities and cities across the US where curbside composting is going to be the the mainstream thing, right? It's like your recycling, you just put out your bin at the side of the road with your food scraps from your kitchen cooking. So I think as that gains momentum, the knowledge of what composting is and the power of composting is also going to catch on. But even with that, because of curbside composting, those streams can only handle food waste, they can, for instance, handle our underwear in the green bin just yet. Because they can't even handle compostable coffee cups. It's a totally different waste management process. So, so we created our own compost take-back program to help tackle that. So if no one has access to compost, they can still participate and be part of the end-of-life process.
10:29
So if right now, someone doesn't have some kind of composting process at home, it's probably they're better off doing the is there they just shipping their clothes back to you, I assume?
10:41
Exactly. Yeah. So they send it back to us. We have a composting partner here in California, and they receive a credit to shop on our website as a kind of thank you for not throwing your clothes in and landfill.
10:56
Nice. That's pretty smart. That was a good move. What uh, you mentioned, though, that a bunch of people met, said, like, Oh, I didn't know you could plant your underwear and said, like, can you also just plant it and let it just eventually dissolve? Like? I mean, I'm naive to this. So I apologize. Yeah,
11:15
you could totally do that. It's like you planting an apple or an avocado, it's not, it's going to take a lot longer than if you put it in compost. Because the benefits are compost, it's like very active and has a ton of natural organisms that are breaking down the compost itself. So when you throw it just like in a garden, it doesn't have that activity going on. So it will take longer. But I mean, by all means, you can totally do it. And experiment and see how long it'll take.
11:55
It would be pretty interesting for it to be kind of regular for everyone to have like a hole in their backyard. Oh, well, that's my old kind of stuff.
12:04
That's my DIY can't compose.
12:09
So you. So you're obviously on Shark Tank. What? What made it very interesting to ask some of these questions in the Shark Tank thing? Because I don't think I've had a single, I guess you don't really call them contestants. But I haven't had a single person that was on Shark Tank give me basically the same answer. But what made you want to apply to be on the show? Or even did you apply? Did they hunt you down or like how that how the beginning process go,
12:34
we did apply to be on the show. And from what I hear that's quite unusual, where a lot of the brands or companies that go on Shark Tank are hunted down or however you say hit. So we wanted to apply because we felt like we had gained enough momentum ourselves in bootstrapping and growing this business over a year in and felt like it was the right time to get both an injection of capital to help us skip ahead and our growth plan but also get the exposure because you can't beat the eyeballs that are on Shark Tank. So it was an easy decision for us to apply. But I will say the process to get on the show was a lot, a lot of work. Six to seven months in the making. So it's not for the faint of heart. But it was amazing. It was an amazing experience in the lead-up and then actually being on the show, too.
13:38
Yeah. So you mentioned the eyeballs on Shark Tank. So this was the thing I was really excited to ask you about my wife and I are big fans who watch it all the time. And we had no idea they were doing a live episode, which was very okay. What was it like so obviously, for those who are listening and didn't see it, you actually were one of the first companies to do this on Shark Tank where you were? I guess not perfect. You were pitching in front of a live audience as well as the sharks. What was that like? Like that shows not nervous enough when you're sitting there pitching and then they add what looked like probably good 75 to 100 people at least sitting there watching. It was
14:22
insane but amazing experience. It was overwhelming. I quite liked having the studio audience there, to be honest, it felt like they were cheering and in our corner were oftentimes in Shark Tank's normal situation. It feels like the sharks are really asking you a ton of questions and you feel like you're on the spot. But to have the audience then literally behind the Shark Tank panel and cheering us on felt like it gave us this constant a boost of confidence. And I think we also have a newborn baby and he hadn't been sleeping well that week. So I think being like a little bit sleep deprived gave me like, less of a nervous outlook, perhaps where it's like, Okay, we just got to do this. Let's get out there and just have some fun. So, the sharks were amazing because they it was their first time doing a live episode. So we're all kind of in the same boat. It wasn't like this was old hat to them. We were all trying to figure it out on the spot. So I think that also made it a little less nerve-wracking.
15:36
Yeah. Nice. So you didn't get a deal? Obviously, congratulations. Thank you, at least from the show. I know sometimes post-show they don't always happen. What was it? Like? Are you still working with Damon? And if so how's that going? What's that whole relationship look like?
15:53
Yeah, so we chatted with Daymond. Since the show, he's really great. And we're working with his team to hash out all the fine details of the deal. So as with any shark tank deal, kind of on air, it's a handshake deal. And now we go into like due diligence and all that fine line. So we're still working through that.
16:17
Yeah. Makes a lot of sense. I mean, I remember, we're a little over a year now doing this podcast, and one of the first times I interviewed a shark tank person, I was just like, I really should have known that they do a lot of due diligence after and that it wasn't just some handshake deal. Makes a lot more sense. So how was that? I don't think that episodes re-aired yet. Right? It's just aired the one time so far, I believe. So yeah. Just came out of the season. How was the response? Like a day off and you know, shortly thereafter,
16:53
it's been really great. And I think we definitely got a nice influx of people to our website, and sales took a nice bump. And just the residual awareness of our appearance on Shark Tank, which we've been leveraging through the press, and just overall word of mouth and exposure has been awesome. So from what I've heard with other brands that have gotten on Shark Tank, every time it does repairs, you say Do you see a little like a spike in sales? You'll know I think, well, we'll keep an eye out for that. But, it's been great so far.
17:33
So I know that I know as well that because at least this was the case when you'd mentioned the show, I think you were on track to probably clear about half a million this year, which based on that growth, you'll probably clear seven figures next year at least come pretty close to it. Although I'd assume with that influx in the capital, you should be in a good spot. What did you expect that kind of growth when you first started off? Or were you expecting it kind of more of a slower, kind of traditional ramp? Yeah,
18:04
I think, in the beginning, we anticipated slower growth just because we hadn't yet decided to raise outside capital until about a year ago. And so without that influx, it was always just reinvesting profits. And so that's always a slower growth game than if you were to complement with outside capital to invest in both product marketing, community building everything that goes around it. So I think for us, we're really excited about where things are headed and lucky that we have both this potential deal with Daymond. But also additional investors that have come on and have shown interest to help us grow the vision of this brand, to make it something really big.
18:54
Nice. So as of recording this, we're actually what like set Wednesday, so two days before Black Friday one of the biggest shopping days of the year. And then obviously, the front half of December is always really impressive. This is it's definitely not your first Black Friday, but I would say it's your first Black Friday since you recently got national coverage. So what have you how have you kind of prepped for you know, q4 here, and like what kind of campaigns have you put together? Like, what's your strategy been for this year?
19:24
Yes. So in terms of prepping for the holidays, just having product available has been our key priority because over the past year, there have been instances where we sell out and that's never a good situation. We're leaving sales on the table. So having product has been kind of our number one focus in prepping for q4 Black Friday is actually something we don't traditionally participate in from a discount perspective because well, one our prices, we've priced them so strategically or appropriately, where we feel like it's not a cost-cutting exercise for us throughout the year to get people to buy, and we don't want to just be promoting shopping for shopping sake. So our theme this year for Black Friday is about saving, saving, saving the Earth. So how can you save the Earth? Percentage savings in the missions and water and things like that. So it's, it's definitely a different take. And I know that it might be a missed opportunity for us in terms of sales, but it's just the way it just sits a lot better with our ethos and the way that we want to operate as a company to not be constantly slashing prices.
20:51
Yeah, no, I actually really admire that it's way too often that the question when it comes time to prep for, you know, Black Friday in any part of q4 is, how much of a discount Are we willing to give? And I don't think I think that if you're constantly having discounts, you start to diminish the brand. And it actually, in my opinion, starts to hurt sales after a while as well, because people are just sitting around waiting for your next sale. So your sales are basically flat or nothing until you've got some kind of discount going. And plus, you know, it can kind of diminish the brand, especially, you know, sometimes you see these sales that are 40 to 60% off. And you know, it kind of makes the consumer at least it makes me feel like Wow, you've been ripping me off an entire year that you could afford to do that. So it does kind of make sense. Where am I? I like the theme concept, but not catering, to constantly slashing prices,
21:49
exam, a lot goes into making our products and it's not like we're marking it up in such a big way. It's just we use really beautiful materials and we produce here in LA. So it's more expensive to do that. So kind of our price bundles that all in together.
22:08
So is it all completely sourced and created here in LA? Or is it? Or do you have other aspects of it overseas?
22:16
We do import our materials from Peru, that's the only place in the world where you can find the specific materials that we use. And everything else is sourced and manufactured in the US.
22:32
Nice, beautiful. So you don't have too much of a supply chain problem.
22:37
No, luckily we don't. So that's also another benefit. Yeah. Yeah, so love the fact that we can just dry 15 minutes over to our factory say hello to everyone knows exactly who's working on our products, and have such a great relationship with them.
22:59
That is very cool. That is usually not the case at all. It's usually like a 15-hour flight. But Stacey, I know you're super busy. And I don't want to take up too much of your time. So I really appreciate you having me on the show. I would love to give you the opportunity, of course, to tell everyone where they can find out more about you and about chat.
23:19
Awesome. Well, thank you so much. And you can find us at wearekent.com or on Instagram where Kent and it's been great. Thank you so much for having us.
23:35
Yeah, not a problem. Thank you. Obviously, everyone that tuned in thank you as well please make sure you rate your review, and subscribe to all that fun stuff on whichever platform you prefer, or head over to theecommshow.com to check out all of our previous episodes on our YouTube channel or whatever you want. It doesn't matter either way. Thank you all so much for tuning in. And we will see you all next time.
23:56
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.
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