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Hello and welcome to the advice line on how I built this lab.
I'm Guy Riz. This is the place where we help try to solve your business challenges.
Each week, I'm joined by a legendary founder, a former guest on the show who will attempt with me to help you.
If you're building something and you need advice, give us a call.
You just might be the next guest on the show.
Our number is 1-800-433-1298.
Send us a one-minute message that tells us about your business and the issues or questions that you'd like help with.
You can also send us a voice memo at hibt.id.wondery.com and make sure to tell us how to reach you.
And also, don't forget to sign up for my newsletter.
It's full of insights and ideas from the world's greatest entrepreneurs.
You can sign up for free at GuyRiz.com.
We'll put all this info in the podcast description.
All right, let's get to it.
Joining me this week is Holly Thagger.
She's the founder of Super Goop, the brand that made sunscreen cool again.
Holly, welcome to the show.
Thank you for coming back on.
Guy, I'm super excited to be here today.
All right, so Holly, you first came on to the show back in 2020's great episode, of course, to tell the story of how you created Super Goop.
And one of the really big challenges that you faced early on was explaining this product to people.
You were trying to make the case that people should wear sunscreen every day like they brushed their teeth, that it wasn't something you should only use at the beach.
And by the way, since that episode aired, I wanted to thank you for that because I wear sunblock on my face and like every day now because of you.
Love it. Because I was starting to notice sunspots on my face and I was like, hey, maybe sunblock.
Obviously, you managed to make the case well because you went on to, your brand Super Goop does hundreds of millions of dollars in sales every year.
You're still the company's chairman.
And we're going to be talking to a few founders today who are trying to enter new and niche markets and trying to figure out how do you explain the product to people when they're not fully aware of how to use it.
So we think about Super Goop in such a different way than how you originally launched it because it really was like a brand designed with kids in school in mind.
Like your original approach was, hey, let's build a brand that is in schools.
And there are huge buckets of this stuff and teachers and kids will constantly have access to this sunblock.
And that strategy just didn't work.
Like anyone who's trying to deal with as a public school district knows it's really challenging.
You eventually pivoted and started to focus on consumers.
But that wasn't the plan, right?
I mean, that wasn't the model.
No. You know, first year out of college, I was a third grade school teacher.
And it was later when my friend was diagnosed with skin cancer that I looked back at that time in the classroom and realized that we're not teaching our youth this healthy habit of wearing SPF every single day.
Yet we're telling them to wash their hands in the cafeteria and we have fences around the playground.
And so my original idea was to create this brand and this formula, then get it into school classrooms.
And you're right, I had to pivot because at the time over the counter drugs were not allowed in schools.
And they were thought of like you wouldn't send your kindergarten to school with Advil.
And so it was a pivot, but I knew we still had a job to do in educating our youth.
And over the course of these 20 years, I've also been a big advocate on Capitol Hill and been able to change these laws that are antiquated and that existed in schools today.
We're up to I think 26 states that now allow SPF in schools for the reason of protecting our youth skin, our body's largest organ.
And so what a blessing that I was not offered a contract after my first year of teaching in a school because my world kind of came crashing down after that first year and I was not offered a return contract.
And I couldn't understand how I just finished college to do this.
And looking back, I'm so grateful for not being offered that contract because I am and still feel like I'm a teacher.
I just have a much larger audience than the 17 third graders I had that year.
And I am a teacher in a much larger way.
Yeah, it's awesome. Holly, let's take our first call.
Oh, great. I'm so excited.
All right. Caller number one.
Hello, welcome. Hi. Hi, Holly and Guy.
I'm so excited to be here.
Hi. Please introduce yourself.
Tell us your name, where you're calling from and briefly about your business.
Yeah, my name is Christina Davis and I'm calling in from Cincinnati, Ohio.
And I'm one of the founders of Davis Cookie Collection.
We specialize in delicious cookies made by hand with real ingredients.
Amazing. And what's your question for us today?
My question is how can we step back from daily business tasks and ensure that the business operates independently and efficiently allowing us to focus on expanding our brand?
And when is it a good time to find a mentor?
All right. Awesome. Well, thank you for calling and welcome to the show.
First of all, tell us about how you got into the cookie business.
Yes. I was in grad school and it was extremely stressful.
So I would bring samples of my cookies to class.
I already knew how to make cookies from a young age just watching my family.
And one of my colleagues eventually offered to pay me $15 for a dozen of cookies.
And at that moment, something clicked and I said, wow, I could start doing this as a business.
I always wanted to be an entrepreneur.
I just had no idea what that was going to be.
So the very next day I presented this idea to my husband and a business was born.
We knew one day we would have a large collection of cookies, which we do now.
We have over 300 flavors.
And we created a Facebook page.
Everyone started ordering by the dozen and the rest was history.
Did you do a job on the side or did you just jump into this business?
Well, actually, I continued working the business while in grad school while doing an internship and also while working a full-time job.
I just continued to work this business on the side.
Wow. What did you do? I was in school to be a social worker and then I worked at the UC Medical Center in the emergency room in Cincinnati.
And I went ahead and graduated with my master's, became a social worker, but the business continued to grow so much that I had to resign from my job in 2019.
So you took the leap, you jumped into this thing full-time.
Tell me where what you guys have now.
Do you have a shop? How are you selling your cookies?
Is it mainly online? So we have a cookie shop and we opened this location during the pandemic in 2020 and then we launched a cookie truck last year.
And then we also have online sales and we launched our cookie dough at Kroger here at one location last year as well.
Oh, wow. So you sell your cookie to a Kroger, which is based in Cincinnati, which is a good market.
Cincinnati is a great market to be in for obvious reasons like Kroger's there, P&G is there, Scripps and other really big companies are there.
And also it's like a good test market.
A lot of companies test their products in places like Cincinnati and Columbus because there's a really, like reflects the demographics of the US.
So tell me a little bit about what your hope is.
Like what are you guys trying to do?
So we're really trying to scale the business.
I feel like we're stuck right now trying to figure out how to do that.
How do we allow the business to kind of run itself so that we can scale?
We want to get into more locations, whether that's other grocery stores, maybe open more locations or launch more trucks, but we're just stuck.
We've been in business almost, it's been 11 years actually.
And it's just kind of a tough spot right now.
We're feeling some growing pains for sure.
Yeah. Do you, I mean, do you have like a, you talk about looking for mentors or how to find them?
Are you, are you part of like at any organized community, like a church or a community group or any, like, you know, like a community group
