 What does Sunday look like for you? Um, like what would my perfect sundae... You mean the ice cream sundae? Oh, no, sorry. Ha ha! Benjamin Von Lewin, CEO and co-founder of Von Lewin Ice Cream. You ready to answer some questions? I think so. Who did your branding and what was the brief? When we founded VanLewin 12 years ago, my partners and I did the branding. We were inspired mostly by the Coca-Cola logo. We wanted a logo that was really strong and that sort of incorporated a little bit of nostalgia, a little bit of Americana, because we wanted to reinvent the ice cream shop. That's how we started VanLewin. Why VanLewin is a name? Originally we wanted to call it churn. I thought churn was the most brilliant name. Lawyers said no, it's too generic. Laura O'Neill, my business partner and co-founder, said why don't we use your last name? No one could pronounce our last name or spell our last name. We thought it was a horrible idea, but it ended up, I think, working. So churn does sound great. It sounds exactly like any cool short name, startup, everything. Yeah. And the lawyers told you now? There were too many other ice creams with churn in the name, either their name or the name of the ice cream. So hard to protect, hard to own, okay. And then, because VanLewin, I had no idea it was your last name. It's just this, like, foreign-y, interesting something, and I guess... VanLewin's a Dutch name. Our dad's a Dutch Jew. They were called Levy, and then 300 years ago they wanted to fit in in the Netherlands, so they changed it to VanLewin. Assimilated. Did you ever think about just being a pint company or a scoop shop? So originally we only wanted to sell ice cream off of trucks. There was no plan to go into wholesale or open stores. If you had one marketing dollar to spend, where would you spend it? Product. PR or influencers? PR. What's been the biggest media marketing investment you've made today? Targeted social media. Were you going to go with the Coca-Cola thing if you were churn or VanLewin? Yes, so the aesthetic was... Our vision for the aesthetic was really clear. And how much of your success do you credit to brand aesthetic? 20% of our success, exactly 20%. What makes you special? The reason I'm special in relation to running a business and running an ice cream business is because I'm really scared of not doing well and I have a pretty good palate. So I'm obsessed with making the most delicious product possible and I'm terrified that one day we won't be doing that so I'm constantly trying to make it better to serve people delicious products. Who is one person you'd love to have ice cream with that are alive? John Bonham, the drummer from WhatsApp. How much ice cream do you eat a week? I eat two to four pints of ice cream a week at least. What gets you more excited? Lines out the door or sold out of grocery? Lines out the door. Do you spend more time focusing on the pint or the scoop shop? 50-50. What do you do in-house versus out-of-house? Creative, digital, PR, marketing? So creative we do... We sort of do a combination in-house, out-of-house. So we have an in-house marketing team. We also just started working with Wyden and Kennedy and ad agency. We outsource our PR and for creating assets we do a combination. So for big projects we work with Pentagram. For smaller projects in-store assets we do those in-house. What brands, past or present, do you aspire VanLuin to be like? Coca-Cola, present. We love what Sweet Green has done with retail. I love Blue Bottle, what they've done with retail and obsession with the product. And then in CPG... I mean I love brands where product is king and where that's more important, where that's what built the brand rather than PR and marketing. So I love Mary's Gone Crackers, the gluten-free crackers. I really love a brand called Jovial Pasta. They've been doing pasta for like 40 years. It's not that popular but they make the best gluten-free pasta I've ever had. Better than a lot of non-gluten-free pastas. Ice cream is so fun. What makes the ice cream business hard? What makes the ice cream business hard is distribution. So you need a very low temperature cold chain. So we have a tiny list of distributors who can distribute ice cream. Distributors who do frozen pizza can't do ice cream. Ice cream needs to be a lot colder. So we need to be at least negative 10 degrees. What opportunity did you see? There's no shortage of good ice cream, in my opinion. The opportunity we saw was to make an ice cream using only extraordinary ingredients. So through and through the product, not just in a way where we sprinkle one in and talk about it on Instagram, make a really clean label product and then finally make a base that was the highest fat and highest egg yolks, which is what gives it the creaminess and the chewiness. So objectively, our ice cream is the most differentiated on the shelves by far if you're not comparing the low calorie stuff both in dairy and vegan. So we have the highest fat, highest solids, cleanest label and without question we're using the best flavoring ingredients. What does Sunday look like for you? Like what would my perfect Sunday? You mean the ice cream Sunday? Oh no, sorry. Sunday, day of the week. What do you do on Sunday? A typical Sunday for me is waking up. I love to work out and I have to work out because I eat so much ice cream. So I like to get that out of the way as quickly as possible. So I work out, if I have time I go to the farmer's market, buy some vegetables, go home. I like to cook Indian food, so I cook a lot of Indian food. Hang out with my girlfriend, walk the dog, play with the kitten. When did you decide to do vegan? We started doing vegan ice cream five years into the business. So this was seven years ago. And a lot of customers were asking for dairy free. When we did vegan, the goal wasn't to make good vegan ice cream. It was to continue making extraordinary ice cream with vegan ingredients. What's next for VanLuin? What's next for VanLuin is a lot more CPG distribution. So we're looking to go national with the brand. We're also launching novelties in the next year, which we're really excited about and continuing to open stores in New York and California and other new markets. Our novelties sandwiches and... So novelties are ice cream bars, sandwiches. Got it. Give me your investor pitch. Our investor pitch is that we're obsessed with product and we're working hard every day to make the most delicious ice cream possible. Is that really what you said in the room to Strand? Like, people give their pitch. They're really 32nd pitch. It should be... Yeah, I mean, it's along the lines of that, like product first. So the most important thing is the product. So strip away the marketing PR and making an extraordinary product. We think people will buy it forever for their entire lives. So we don't want to build a band with PR and marketing. We want to use those things just to support the product, but not the other way around. Are you lucky? Yeah, absolutely. Did a name like Van Luen feel like an okay bet because Haagen-Daz was kind of a for any name and they've been very successful? We really weren't thinking about it in that way, but we thought the name looked nice and we liked the idea of putting our name on something because we believed in it so much and we were and now are even more obsessed with making the best product possible. Is there anything that bothers you about the brand? What bothers me about the brand is we're super grassroots. We started with 60,000 bucks. We did a really good job with the branding. The name sounds very old and iconic. So sometimes people over assume sort of how much money is behind us and where we came from. How has the marketplace changed since you launched? When we launched, there were like three artisanal brands on the shelves in Whole Foods. Now there's 60, so it's become super saturated. Ben Van Luen, CEO and co-founder of Van Luen Ice Cream, thank you so much for coming here and answering some questions. Absolutely. I'm Ian Wishingrad and I'll see you next time on I'm With the Brand.