 Hello and welcome to the Launchpad. This is an offshoot of the Start of the Storefront podcast where we talk to the founders of companies that are just getting started and whose stories we find compelling. Today we talk with Jordan Nathan, founder of the Cookware company, Caraway, born of an unfortunate incident where Jordan was actually poisoned by his Teflon Cookware. Jordan set out to educate and inform the market while creating a high end line of ceramic alternatives. So without further ado, I present to you our conversation with Jordan. Alright guys, welcome to the podcast. On today's show we have Jordan, the founder of Caraway. Jordan, thanks for joining. Tell everyone a little bit about Caraway. Yeah, thanks for having me today. Caraway is a direct-to-consumer home goods and kitchenware brand. We sell non-toxic ceramic based Cookware. Comes in five beautiful colors, comes with a storage system, and currently we sell on our website. I'm really excited to talk to you for one really big reason. The hardest thing for at least my household to purchase is always a mattress and then pots and pans are number two. And I think it's so difficult because there's so much marketing that can confuse you at any direction, right? And so when you decided to go down this road, what did you see as the opportunity of the market? What was something that you saw people may have gotten wrong and you wanted to either bring light to or give your own take on? What was like the impetus for starting Caraway? The story of why I had started it was a couple of years ago, just like any other night, came home, started to cook. I had Teflon coated pans at home, put one on a burner. I think I got a call and I forgot I left the burner on with the pan sitting there with no food in it. About 45 minutes went by and my whole apartment ended up being filled. The fumes felt really sick and nauseous and gave poison control a call and they had educated me that I was likely exposed to Teflon poisoning from the fumes from the overheated pan and really couldn't wrap my head around the fact that something that I was cooking off of and touching my food was potentially dangerous. And so started to really dig into the category found that 95% of nonstick cookware is made with Teflon and felt there was just a really big opportunity in the space to create products around safety and non-toxic materials, but as you mentioned, it is a really challenging purchase for consumers just because there's four to five core materials out there, there's lots of marketing jargon, there's price points from 20 bucks all the way to 1,000. Most people don't even know what's in their kitchen and so it's almost this category that has this perfect wave of almost every problem from pricing to lack of brand affinity to materials and so it definitely made it challenging when launching the brand to think through how to correctly decide what to focus on and what was the final product we wanted to launch. Well, first of all, it's an incredible story. I'm sorry that happened to you, but I'm glad something positive came out of it. So what's your first step? Is your first step researching? Teflon, you go down that rabbit hole, realize this is crazy and then what do you start doing then? Do you start thinking like what materials can we use that would be beneficial for cooking but also non-toxic? What does that look like? Yeah, first step was really looking into what else was out there. There were things like cast iron and stainless steel and ceramic which we use today and just by kind of looking across online reviews and talking with friends and family, one of the consistent themes that I found was that a lot of people were just daunted by the experience of cooking and it didn't feel easy to a lot of people and so stainless steel and cast iron are great options and they exist for a reason but they're heavier, they're harder to clean and I wanted something that was non-stick and easy and ceramic is this amazing material that's actually been around for about 10 years and has really kind of sat on retail shelves. The story has never been told, people who buy it don't know why they own it and wanting to be a digital first brand felt there's a really unique opportunity to take something that already existed that was safe and bring it to market in a different way using a digital platform with education and storytelling as a means to bring the brand to life. That's super smart. We'll touch on the digital media strategy in a second but you want to develop a prototype. Let's say how do you do it? Do you just go to Alibaba or what's your first step as it relates to just getting these prototypes and seeing you know how you could start to design and create the pots and pans? Well Alibaba is a fantastic tool but prior to Caraway I actually worked at a company called Mohawk Group who owns four consumer product brands and I ran their kitchen division called Vremi and I actually had launched 200 kitchen products under that brand everything from cookware to bakeware, some small appliances and gadgets and so you know fortunately came with some experience in the category and came with prior relationships so that kind of sourcing was a little bit easier on my end just because I had experience that the challenging part was really finding factories who could execute the design we were looking to make as you've seen it does look very different it's manufactured in a different way. We vet our factories based off you know a number of eco qualifications and so you know we were definitely more stringent on that side of things and it took a little bit longer but you know a couple trips over to the factories and you know we were able to find one that could really you know see our vision and execute the quality we were looking for. And then in terms of I mean that's a great insight in terms of that you got to see all these companies basically brand themselves and kind of work as an insider and so you got to see what worked, what didn't work, what was successful, how important was the digital strategy or at least was that equally important as having the right product and the right look to you before you officially launched the company? I would say so I mean we really started with I think a product first mentality at the brand certainly evolved since you know the initial the story and founding. I think what we've learned is our website's just a really great platform for education and around materials around home decor around helping people learning how to cook and so we really see it as a massive marketing tool and I always say this but I wish early on I knew how important the digital product was because in many cases it's actually more important than the physical product and so as we've grown we've really continued to invest more in you know not just our website but our blog, our social platforms and so on. Yeah you know it's funny during COVID we've had interviews with so many different founders, Therragon comes to mind the most so Dr. J from Therragon basically his whole like they were releasing a new product and this whole thing got delayed and so it was the time for them to say what do we do and they just lean so heavily into education and he became so aware to the fact that social media, Instagram, videos all of that just became a way for him to educate the market on recovery which was now staying at home and not really going anywhere right and so he just doubled down on education and my takeaway to all of this and this has kind of always been the way I viewed it but recently because of COVID I think has been cemented it's like companies today are really two farms you have the media side of your business and then you have your product and you have to do both really really well in order to sustain in order to survive which makes it kind of hard right because and this kind of lands on the next question you have to have capital to do that you have to you have to know what the costs of those are and some of it might feel like a crap shoot to an inexperienced entrepreneur but it's massively important in terms of raising capital how did you go about that do you have investors or you had a seed round what's your current stage of funding yeah so we raised a five point three million seed rounds back in March of this year we've actually got over a hundred investors in the business a mix of angels VCs family offices and so we've we've taken more of an approach of getting a larger number of people to support the business and it's proofs invaluable you know that we have we've got a network of over a hundred people who any company we want an introduction to we have that connection and so it's it's been a really I think different approach but has been really helpful in the short term so you close around pre-pandemic we want to get any we got it in just before we're super lucky what has it been like during COVID for you how have you gone about launching this company during has it helped in some way or have you just leaned on what works what's what's been like I think overall super lucky to be in a category that people are still buying from obviously people are stuck at home they're cooking more people are taking dollars that would have gone into maybe experiences or clothing or you know something for work and are now investing it in their home and so I think most home categories are seeing an uptick and we've definitely you know benefited because of that but on the supply chain side we've had many many challenges because of that increased demand a lot of facilities or vendors are at capacity for production things are taking longer there's not as many workers at the factories it's tougher to get freight to get over from Asia to the US and then general costs as well are just skyrocketing right now and so you know we've been doing our best to meet demand but I've seen you know a number of challenges for instance we actually were sold out of our product from April this year all the way through August pretty much at any given moment had a six week ship date on our website and every batch that came over you know into our warehouse just went out to the back orders and it took quite some time to get fully back in stock I guess it's a bit of a happy problem but never ideal for your sort of that first that first taste or the first introduction but I guess people understand I mean now it's crazy times in terms of selling your product I mean I'm gonna ask the obvious question here grocery stores are the place to be or were for a long time are you at least considering selling your product in grocery stores or in a retail format or do you just want to stick to an online e-commerce type of business I think as we think about the world distributions a huge advantage currently our sites are main channel but we do sell on platforms like Goop West Elm Critten Barrel all digital food 52 a number of others and a lot of our approach to marketing is to actually be in places that you wouldn't expect and so a lot of our content strategy a lot of the imagery we use a lot of the marketplaces we sell in many of them are more focused on design home decor and so you know grocery certainly an interesting area but I think for us we feel it's more expected and so we try to go after you know some of these areas where maybe cookware doesn't exist today and we can really stand out and I think in one sense it makes it a lot more approachable for the consumer I think it makes sense I mean I mentioned this offer but I'll mention it during during this interview to my wife's obviously an architect and owns her own construction company and the thing that as soon as she saw the product she's like this is beautiful and I think at least for us you know you want your kitchenware to be a piece you know you want it to look good you wanted to people come into your house they see it it's not this obtrusive ugly thing it doesn't need to hang from the ceiling it can just like be sitting and still look really good which is important how much time did you spend on that I'm just getting the design right and then the color combinations that you guys have we spent about a year to get the product to market we just made it in time for holidays in 2019 for a launch but you know everything throughout the brand we wanted to be an experience so colors was actually one of the hardest pieces of the product development I think yeah I think almost like two or three weeks before we placed our first order for a production run we still had 10 colors in the running and had to make a quick decision but we always wanted something that didn't exist in the category that felt supernatural and toned down from a lot of the colors you typically see across the kitchen industry and everything you know from the fit of the handle to the unboxing experience the manual itself is is a really fun booklet most people don't really think about the manual but there it is actually yep yeah it's actually our consumers one of the favorite pieces of the whole experience and kind of as you referenced before it's really tough being a digital brand today because every single touch point has to be amazing and it's not just in the physical product but the emails the website SMS social and really pull that full experience together what the brand stands for it's funny you mentioned the the touch point on the pen my so literally that's what my wife was like this is so intelligent so there's a part of it maybe you can explain a little bit better than I can just to give people a sense of what I'm talking about the handle yeah and the handle exactly yeah it's basically a finger rest to prevent your hand from going up to the point where the handles actually get hot the product development process there were things that we brought into the experience that we wanted to fix but we spent a lot of time looking through data and reviews and you know handles getting hot not knowing where to put the lids capacity is not being large enough we really wanted to not necessarily reinvent cookware right but just add some thoughtful features that made the experience better I loved it I thought it was like so smart I was like of course they should do this why doesn't every pan do this right that's when I was like oh that they're taking it to a level that doesn't currently exist in the marketplace when you think about or even when you raise your funds or when you closed your round are you what are you raising it on in terms of evaluation are you raising it like a tech company are you raising it as like a hardware company a mix most of our investors are consumer focused tech valuations are certainly much much much higher almost two to three times I've seen past that as well and when we were raising COVID just hit markets weren't doing well consumer had a couple poor exits or you know failures over the past year and so valuations have actually gotten pushed down quite a bit and so typically you're raising at a multiple of of your your run rate but also you know it's up to you to kind of pitch the vision of the business and how big it can really get yeah how big can it get what's on the horizon so you've launched let's call it your your seed product in terms of the this market how do you view what you want to do what is are there a number of products you want to keep rolling out give us a window into the future of all the things that you might have in store sure you know we look at cookware as a really fantastic entry point into the home in the kitchen it's you know where our roots lie it's got such a big market in front of it but we also think the same principles that we brought to cookware can also be applied to many items in the home and so as we start to grow and expand we call ourselves caraway home for a reason because we do see opportunity to bring nontoxic materials thoughtful features storage and education you know to the rest of your home and so over the next couple of years we'll certainly be looking to expand the product line everything with the same functionality features and also you know just giving you exactly what you need in the short term kitchen is certainly where we're a little bit more interested given we've started there but you know as i think we expand and hit some core categories the beauty of the home is there's just so many products that you can launch yeah it's almost overwhelming i was instantly thinking of like i'd be cool if it came with like a spatula you know these what i would call like these high margin items that fit with the look of everything else that's that's all that people are already consuming or purchasing definitely and we've already started differentiating a little bit we launched with our cookware set it came in five colors it was just the set we've since launched single pieces we rolled out a linen's line with dish towels oven mitts aprons and things like that and so there's a nice mix of like hero products in the category but also accessories that people also need and then in terms of your digital strategy what makes it up is it especially during covid i guess is are you guys doing a lot with influencers or is instagram the main social media channel obviously you mentioned you have an email list how do you what are some of the things that you're you're really leaning into during this time instagram's a big piece of our business not just on our own social paid but as a paid acquisition channel we've been really fortunate to work with an amazing group of brand ambassadors we actually have over 500 influencers in our brand ambassador group most of them are instagram related but also you know scattered across blogs and youtube and some other channels and so we really lean into that group as advocates for our brand telling the story customers really trust them and it's been a great community to have who really love our product and can vouch for us outside of that doing a lot of the same tactics as most traditional direct-to-consumer brands like facebook ads and google but also leveraging you know our content channels and creating the website as a destination for people to come to you know it's it's obviously great if you come and buy the product but we also want you to get more out of it and learn you know about how to decorate your home or how to you know incorporate other healthy products you know into your cooking routine totally makes sense i wanted to ask you something about the brand ambassador ship so are you guys doing like year-long brand ambassador programs there's it like a six month thing where they're just producing weekly or daily content i just want to window into it so right now personally there's a company who wants me to become a brand ambassador and i'm like i'm in the throes of this with and it's it's neither a science right it's neither an art or a science there's a lot of ambiguity so from your perspective right as the person as the as the company owner the founder what is it that's just that you love that you love about the brand ambassadors and or your ideal right like what is it that you see really push the needle as it relates to these people besides their following right besides like just the reach they have i think what's interesting about our program is is we've actually never done any outreach for people to come join it it's ambassadors who were either customers about the product or heard about it and they're reaching out to us which creates more of an authentic relationship and so you know we look for people who really love the brand really love the product we get hundreds and hundreds of requests per week so many so we can't necessarily get back to everyone you know on a timely basis and so i think aligning interests with really you know authentic fans of the brands has been super important and the biggest influencers aren't always the best performers you know sometimes it's the smaller ones with really you know cult-like followings who are the best voices and let's be honest where we're a one-year-old brand that takes decades to build brands that people really trust and having these amazing ambassadors who can really you know tell our story and support the brand has been hugely crucial to our growth what are some of the myths about cookware that you've either debunked on this journey or that you know i'd love to just share with people we try to do this thing where it's like all right let's it's it's it's debunking time so what are the things people get wrong about cookware that either your product has solved or that you in your journey to this product have figured out maybe that you learned yourself i think one is that good cookware actually makes a difference i think most people think any pans are just any pans there are higher quality materials and you do get what you pay for cookware itself in general it seems like a pretty simple product but it actually is highly complex in the production process and materials there's a lot of technology that goes into it and so you know i think whether you're buying stainless steel or cast iron or ceramic there's a lot of benefits and a lot that goes into it anything about the materials in particular i guess ceramic right you said ceramics relatively new but but something that yeah ceramics relatively new i think like a lot of other categories a lot of brands aren't super transparent about their materials and i think you need to be careful and really really look into the fine lines of most with ceramic there are a lot of products on the market where ceramic is mixed with teflon and they don't really tell you that no one's really sharing testing reports and so it is important to you know understand who's making your products what it's made of and you know as a brand we're as open as we can we actually share our testing reports if you want to look into the materials further wow that's awesome i like that you do that give everyone who's listening just a price point a sense of of what your products are how much each of them each of them costs and what the the set goes for our core cookware set sells for 395 it comes with four pots and pans three lids and it also comes with an integrated storage system for storing your lids within your cabinet door and some pan racks to modulate fit your cabinets and then our single pieces sell anywhere from 95 bucks to 135 so you know we're certainly a premium price provider but if you look across the spectrum kind of on the lower end of premium when it comes to pricing yeah it sounds like affordable luxury the price when where can people find you tell everyone where they can find the product follow the brand you can check us out at carawayhome.com you can also check us out on goop or food52 or crepe and barrel or west elm and many more in our instagram handle as caraway home as well i love your instagram super beautiful super well done the design is really nice obviously the product matches and so thank you so much for sharing a little bit about your company today and and hopefully we can recap in a few years and see where you're at and see all the different products that you've brought to market sounds great thanks so much for the time thanks jordan