 It's something genuine and it's like it created itself. I think that one of my best feelings as well is when even a pike place and people are bringing their family that are visiting in town saying this is my yoga this is where I go. There's some sort of ownership that people have once they've discovered it you know it's theirs and we've created this little cult in Seattle that's been so supportive of everything we've done and it's helped us grow to where we are currently. This is Startup at Storefront the podcast where we inspire entrepreneurship through truth. Today's guest is Alex Apostolopoulos founder of the Greek yogurt company Elinus. Elinus has gained quite the following in Seattle drawing crowds to word of mouth advertising to their stand at the iconic pike place market but they wouldn't have even gotten to Seattle if it weren't for Yvonne Klein a flight attendant who loved the yogurt so much that she would bring back cases of it whenever she flew to Australia. Eventually she and her husband reached out to Alex and his father about bringing their product to the US. The four became business partners and set out to win consumers over one taste at a time. So listen in as we cover everything from the challenges of finding a dairy farmer in the US who would work with them if we'll see yogurt breweries pop up in the next few years and why some of the simplest flavors are the most challenging to make. Hang on hang on if you're not subscribed can you go ahead and do that right now before we get on with the video helps us out tremendously. That's all we ask and we're back. Welcome to the podcast everyone on today's show we're talking to Alex the founder of Elinus. Alex please tell everyone a little bit about your company. Hi my name is Alex thanks for listening. What we do is we make pretty much the best Greek yogurt because it's tasted well the best thing you probably even tasted. It's based on my family's traditional recipe that's been handed down through generations yet. That's amazing so you know it's funny this is 10 years ago 12 years ago I used to be an engineer and my last project ever like before I went off to go to startup land was we were doing the Chabani plant in upstate New York and we were engineering all of it and the reason I'm sharing this with you is because I got to see so at that time that company was like hyper growth and I got to see how little equipment they were using and how at capacity this plant well I mean it was crazy it was like how could you guys become a household name with this type of plant it was pretty wild. When you first got into the business what made you what made you want to start the company other than maybe you had a good product and you were like I got to share this with the world like what made you want to take that leap into like doing something that's crazy as starting a company with a competitive highly competitive market. As you say it's pretty competitive and there's a lot of yogurt out there. I grew up in the dairy industry just because my when my dad's family immigrated from Greece to Australia that's what they did they made cheese and yogurt was part of it too and I just have I had this in my pretty much in my blood I remember as a young age that smell of a dairy plant what started Elinos was while we were doing our thing in Australia there was a flight attendant she was based out of Vancouver BC she would fly to Australia and um not unknowing to us she was buying our family's yogurt and smuggling it back across the Canadian border and then over to the states where she was living with her husband so that's Bob and Ebon they're our business partners so this happened for like maybe 10 years she was doing this and she was so passionate about trying to get our yogurt to the state somehow that she kind of heckled Bob to try and figure out how to make it happen then what they did was they bought a produce stand at Pike Place Market so that's the iconic market in Seattle with the idea that one day they'll bring our family's yogurt to it so this is even before they even know who we are and so now Bob is running a produce stand and cold calls my dad in Australia so they just turn off at the door and say we're from Seattle my wife's fallen in love with your yogurt how do we get it to the states and at that time we were also a small company with like we can't just ship it over there we can't move over there and we're not going to tell you how to make it you know that's our secret so that kind of fizzled out that was about 2006 then in 2011 I had graduated I kind of started working outside the family business for a little bit and my dad asked me if I would be interested in doing something with Bob and Avon in the state so this is about 2011 and I thought why not this is something that I was passionate about and we knew that at that stage we you know Australia was still pretty is a pretty small market and the state is always just a it's a huge place and diverse and we said let's take this jump and try and make it over in Seattle so we moved over in 2012 and that first cup of elenos was so we opened up the store and pike place in July 5th 2013 that's incredible yeah yeah that's a crazy story I've only heard one other story like this this is insane so pike place obviously the iconic place in Seattle where Starbucks even has you know grown out of really awesome destination so they just at pike's place just so I can get a sense of it it was like they just had a stand like a little area or was it a legit storefront it's a produce stand so it's a corner it's pretty much the iconic spot as well if you ever see that sign with the pike place on the clock and where the flying fish are flying underneath we're we face we face that and so every day where we open up the doors it's roller doors and you push out all the produce stands come out and now now we scoop yogurt there and uh if anyone hasn't been to us we pretty much display a pretty different with our yogurt display is a lot different than any other yogurt shop you've seen it's more like a gelato stand we have a big case there it's about 30 different flavors of yogurt and that we do all the decorating and flavors that stand there that's insane that's such a crazy story so then okay so as you're seeing traction you're at pike's place people are I imagine loving the yogurt and probably being surprised right I don't think anyone's ever gone to pike place for yogurt and so they're tasting this and they're like this is this is good and then at what point are you like okay we're really on to something we knew we would be but now we are what are the next steps you start deciding to take around maybe getting into grocery stores or just building that brand what was that like for you guys so for the first bit it was pike place was where our main that's all the place we were selling it we're also doing farmers markets and wheeling out a ton of equipment but the early days was my dad and we'd be at the factory making yogurt and I'll be trying to push it out trying to sell it so a lot of the first few months was the years even we're just me driving around with a von to different grocery stores saying hey would you buy this yogurt and like you said at the beginning it is a highly competitive place you know no one what makes you different to anything and we started to get a lot of traction with community support especially like with reviews and that just people's well in love with us so not only that were we trying to sell it but people were starting to ask for it outside of pike place I think the first actual store that actually talked to me was wajimaya it's an Asian grocery store in a base in Seattle they have about five stores and they said oh we have some space you could use it if you want and so we pretty much put up a farmers market set up inside wajimaya Bellevue between the fish department and the gift department and we started scooping there that was one of the first times we were in grocery and they've been really supportive it's another family business based in Seattle and the other things that were going at the same time was those farmers markets we were doing one on the the campus of amazon which was a pike place farmers market outlet just for the summer we were selling out every day it was four hours of a market but we would sell out of yogurt pretty much halfway through the day and we were making as much as we could at the time so it's not like you can turn on the tap and tape more yogurts coming sounds like the big secret here to this was like and this is something that I hadn't considered right so if I go to the grocery store to buy yogurt I have to make a guess I gotta like I've done this before where I'm like okay this one this one and then I'm home with four different kinds and I'm probably only gonna like one of them I mean that's kind of the bummer but it sounds like in your case because you had this gelato style setup right you you're literally and it makes it easy for the consumer you're just like hey just try the one try one and then they can just buy it if they want it but it makes it a lot easier which is smart and then it sounds like you guys just had a lot of word of mouth like people were just like clamoring to it which is I think we forget about that today in a social media era nobody thinks about word of mouth and when people ask me like I get an email every single day probably five emails around oh hey here help your help your podcast growth I've grown social media above all this podcast growth stuff and I'm like we're just gonna go word of mouth because that's what we want that's the person that's gonna actually listen you know and then and then that that takes a life of its own later but for now it's just like we just want word of mouth because we're having good conversations and we want people to connect with that not some little thing they saw on social media that you know no glitter a kind of kind of strategy it's something genuine and it's like it created itself I think that one of my best feelings as well as when even a pike place when people are bringing their family that are visiting in town saying this is my yoga this is where I go there's some sort of ownership that people have once because they've discovered it you know it's theirs and we've created this little cult in Seattle that's been so supportive of everything we've done and it's helped us grow to where we are currently and I want to talk about the recipe you don't have to give us the recipe in terms of like the difficulty of scaling this thing right so you're making it in a very particular part of the world and now you have to try to make it in a different part of the world with different water different cows different dairy and so how did you go navigate that process so we built the factory in Seattle ourselves we didn't hire anyone we just pretty much dug trenches put everything together and then it came to time when we got our first batch of yoga going and it was difficult trying to find someone that would sell us milk you're this new company who are you no one wants to give it to you but we found a family farmer it's in linden washington pretty much on the border of canada and we still use that milk there they kept on stay with the ones that let us use it and then we started making yoga the way we did it so we use a special blend of cultures that we pretty much brought over from australia but what we did here was we were able to change a little things that you know the family family traditions that we couldn't do you know this is how we've always done it in the past this is what we do so we kind of we're able to stretch the boundaries of that and i honestly think the yogurt here in seattle tastes a lot better than any of my cousins or my family but the way we make it is so different to anything else that anyone would make it just because the effort that is required to make that cup of yogurt is so vastly different to how most yogurts made in the world i was gonna ask you like a lot of people don't know how yogurt is made and the reason i i kind of i don't really know how it's made but i know at least the equipment used it looks a lot like a brewery like it the equipment is big tanks and i just want to give our listeners a sense of like how and you know you don't need to be specific but at least like the equipment that it goes through because in people's head i don't really think people understand like at least for me it was shocking when i saw these tanks that literally are like brewery tanks and i'm like why are there tanks here and then it all started to make sense to me because you're playing with bacteria cultures and so it's there's a process there but can you just walk everyone through just a quick you know don't get too scientific but high level yeah so the way we make it so we have a we have we have tanks and we fill it up with milk and we heat it to a certain temperature and then we put our cultures in it and then it has to incubate so what that is when the cultures start pretty much multiplying and yeah it's starting to become yogurt what we do then is a strain it with some cheesecloth so this is something that takes a long time it's about a five day process to get where we want it to be another step that we do that's probably different is we then blend yogurts together so we make pretty much different flavors using different cultures and then blend it like wine so the whole time you have to pretty much be tasting it and seeing what you know to get that right level of sour sweet you're sure you're kind of balancing those flavors together and then after we've got that mixture then we put it in a cup and then that's it's sent out to the stores that's awesome do you ever think about like and i don't know if i don't think this is allowed i guess i kind of answered my question but would you ever think about creating a space where it's like a brewery like like literally the you know they're making it in the background and then instead of tank to tap it's tank to yogurt cup do you ever think about that we've actually so our first plant so our original where we started out was in Georgetown it was tiny and we had this idea of doing something like that but at the time we were at so much a capacity it was pretty much no space it wasn't a safe space probably for have anyone in there but we've always thought that'd be a cool thing to do where people can pretty much see how yogurts made and even maybe try and make them it themselves i think it's something would be working on you know hopefully post corona a year we could probably do something yeah i would love to help you with that as a developer that would be a lot of fun because i mean i just think it would be like so cool and so unique in a real estate play that not many people have ever seen before even thought of or considered yeah especially i guess at your company now right so at some point you're always looking for new recipes which is hard to do with limited equipment you it's hard to test flavors when they take so long to make but at the stage you're at now you probably you know you probably have four or five maybe ten flavors that you just know or this is it yeah so flavors so we pretty much make the one yogurt and then we have a we sweeten the base with our cane sugar and honey that's the flavor of you know that's all the ones that we sweeten there's a vanilla bean one as well that's a base that we use that that took a long time to develop just tasting different vanilla but for flavor work we pretty much tested at pike place so all the flavors that we see on the shelf from us playing around with things at pike place and seeing what's working and not working we have a lot more flexibility yet but still to just see what's seasonal see what's new and then put it out out there and see what people's feedback is yeah that's the best i mean it helps you get the instant feedback loop is there a flavor that is really difficult to make so like let's pretend you and i were i'm like all right alex we're gonna go test every yogurt in the world and then you say okay but i'm gonna try this one and it's and it's because this particular flavors either the most difficult to make or just the most difficult to get right because of the balance of let's say sweet and sour is there one that like you would go to maybe the original one i would say one thing that we've always had problems with uh some of the basic ones so it's like so vanilla bean we didn't get to like a maybe a year ago we put it out so that wasn't one of the most popular flavors of yogurt and everyone's putting out of vanilla but i think there's extremes of what you get to taste it to that alcoholic taste vanilla or that fake vanilla and without flavors it's all about if we're telling you that this tastes like mango it's going to be a mango if this is passion fruit it's passion fruit it's not anything it's going to be it's going to be big bold flavors that you have no you could close your eyes and tag your spoonful and know exactly what it is and so those simpler flavors are the ones where it's harder those subtle ones that don't really come through in yogurt and what stores are you guys at now like where are you guys at all over the world or i guess the united states we've been slowly growing just the way we as i said the way we make it is just hard to expand a little bit that's a capacity issue for sure yeah planning it is hard so it's whole foods we've done whole foods down the west coast in texas we're mid-atlantic now and the midwest will have it those regions we've been working with them amazon fresh and then depending on where you are you can find it on the website there's a few more stores around the country that you could uh pick a zip code in figure out if we're nearby but we're not everywhere yet when it came to you're in dallas now right you said okay are you guys building a plant do you have a plant in dallas so we make it all out of seattle what i'm doing here is trying to do some of that stuff that we back in seattle was building farmers markets doing events trying to get people to taste it because as much as i could tell you how good this yogurt is it's when you get in people's mouth you know that's what convinces they can convince themselves i don't need to say anything and that's what the best thing of what we do is what we make is that it speaks for itself and something that happened because of coronavirus we stopped we couldn't demo anymore and it's trying to figure out new ways of trying to get people to taste our yogurt it's been the biggest focus of our last year yeah what have you guys done so you know we talked to a number of companies that during corona same thing either supply chain issues or they can't go to the grocery store and do these tastings anymore but did you lean into something in particular during this time like was it at market education or just like your your social media presence what was the thing that you were like look we can't do this so we have to do this thing we've been trying a lot of different tactics but it has been a lot of social media sponsoring posts influencers most little micro influencers trying to get people to talk about it we've also had been going to like mums groups gyms trying to just hand out yogurt and give people to try it we did some work with a lot of restaurants in seattle too just trying to get chefs to play with it too just a lot of recipes you can use our yogurt for it's been we've been trying a lot of things to see what could replace just you know being in front of that yogurt set and giving someone a spoonful of yogurt has there anything surprising in the market that you've seen from your customers there's always something that you maybe you thought okay we do good with these people but it turns out oh this group of people loves us and it's like a surprising thing that you would have never projected in the past I've always been surprised how many people that our biggest fans are usually ones that say I hate yogurt they are the ones that yeah it's usually some dude that's never had had that one yogurt before you know that's had a bad taste in his mind but then he's tasted ours and it's changed his mind now he's buying it for his family you know those are the surprising ones yeah I'm here in LA which feels like you know the vegan capital of the world and everyone's like dairy free and you know there's a whole movement as it relates to how you view your product could you ever make this with a nut milk and kind of keep that same taste or is it increasingly difficult we've talked about it with my dad and what options we would have because especially when we're in California and I'm doing demos that's a question I get asked all the time but our focus right now is to try to make this yogurt the best it can be and I think once we get to a stage where we're happy with where it is then we could probably experiment with trying something else afterwards but they're all our attention is just on this one product at the moment to make sure that it's the best all the time when it came to making it is there specific challenge with just shelf life yes that's complete that's another big challenge we have a compared to all everyone else on the set we're pretty much half of what their shelf life is just because there's no preservatives it's just milk cultures and the fruit there's nothing else added to it and the way we make it too it's just it's exposed to the elements for bits because it's being strained by hand so it's just really sensitive so we've been trying our best to create clean environments to for it so it doesn't you know we can try get that shelf life out a little bit more as much so Dave even an extra day for us has always been like a big achievement yeah well good for you guys for at least I mean that's the hard part of any company and I feel like as people grow they always have to compromise right where it's like they'll start off with a no preservative concept and then they'll realize oh it's only gonna last seven days which if your product isn't selling quickly becomes really difficult to manage because it means you're just throwing away a lot of inventory but at the same time you're keeping you promise and so it's this it's a tough business decision to do this that's one of our biggest challenges right now as well just trying to get to the rest of the country will you ever think about like sponsoring the seattle like any seattle teams you know maybe that'd be cool you're watching the soccer team they got elinos on the jersey uh one about so one is a huge seahawks fan and she got me into it uh when one of the the kicker a few years ago when actually had posted a picture of our cup of pumpkin pie yogurt and we all went nuts and once they uh started ordering for their training facility that was that was one of the happiest days we got we got pretty excited for that so they are eating it but yeah we're not sponsoring at the moment I hear that it's always fun when uh you know we talk to some companies that are just now getting into that where they're sponsoring either athletes or doing partnerships with with the major league sports networks and it's like it's really cool you know and the founders are always like I don't know how this happened like this just feels so crazy like they're hanging out with Maria Sharapova and they're like I don't even like I just I just pinch myself it's so crazy but anyway I can see that happening for you that seems like a good growth strategy especially because you have those roots in in in seattle yeah we've been a really good seattle brand I think that's something that we've been iconic is the seattle brand now it's been especially going outside of market and people recognize you as from pike place or from seattle it's pretty exciting just to be see that we have fans everywhere now yeah when it when it comes to funding where are you guys at what stage have you guys done any private equity are you raising money you know what stage would you guys say you're in yeah we have we've had what funding originally it was a whole bootstrap but we uh the latest one was that with uh the founder of kind yeah Daniel Lebesky pretty much his team contacted us and told us how much he loved the product he pretty much saw very similar beginnings of kind in elonoss and at the end of it we got funding from him to help us expand to the rest of the country and he's been an excellent partner it's just his excitement for and passion for elonoss is shared for the way the other founders too so I'm excited for some you know fun things that should be happening in next few years yeah that's amazing what a great contact with someone who knows the space super well too and so at a minimum can just help save you guys a lot of time probably yeah that's it and how big is the company now like if we were to just tally up everyone inside of manufacturing every like how big is that company your company today so we were about 150 people now yeah so a lot of it is the manufacturing team a big part of it just because that's what they're doing but we have now some field marketing and sales people throughout the country too that's great and I imagine do you guys have like a way to just maybe maybe you're mailing out these little samplers to buyers during COVID I don't I'm just thinking out loud like how do you get your your grocery buyer to taste it in a COVID yeah that's that's it it's been a lot of posting you know and and it's never the same I think just getting it from a FedEx box it doesn't it doesn't transport well you our yogurt is also in a clear cup we're very particular about how that looks as well we want to be able you want to be able to see the puree the yogurt then if it's been shaking a lot it ends up looking like a milkshake so trying to get that whole self-presence kept through it you know to make sure that's transported right now how do you go about pricing pricing is always a question whereas it's like one thing is what it costs to make and the other thing is what the market is willing to pay for I think the last time I bought yogurt it was like $1.25 a little carton how do you guys price it so we priced it it's expensive it's one of the most expensive yogurts you'll see it's about three a cup is $3.99 an eight ounce cup but it's quality it's milk it's it's what it costs to make and I think that everyone's used to a commodity where it's you know the 10 for 10s or the you know everything's a dollar yeah that's what they used to but we have shown that people are willing to pay for what that quality is and we're not racing to the bottom I think people are going to pay you know for money's worth it yeah I'm a I'm going to invest in an almond milk company and it's a similar product where it's only four ingredients but shelf life is the issue and so one it's expensive and you have to freeze it and so it's great for coffee shops the coffee shop market has just embraced it but for your average consumer who has to thaw this product before using it and then once it's in once they add water and it's in your fridge it only lasts five to seven days which is not a problem if you're drinking it right so I don't mind that it is more expensive but to your point it's you get what you pay for where there's nothing else in there there's no gums there's no binders there's no fillers it's the cleanest almond milk you could have and it's also super delicious and so it's a tough thing to navigate but I'm glad to hear you're at least sticking to your guns on pricing and but at the same time the hard part is education right so how do you guys educate because the bottle it can only say so much and so how do you guys educate your consumer I think that's what we're trying to get to now usually before it was easy you just let sample people and try to get people to taste because that's what usually educated and that they know that this is very different to what else is on the shelf now I think it's more I think it's going to be more of a social media trying to get reaching more people and trying to get people to tell people our story that way just in the what we're looking at in the next few maybe a year or so share that a little bit with us so you know you've told us that you're you have no preservatives in your product when as it relates to the other products that people see what is it that they're doing other than maybe adding preservatives but like what what types of things are they doing that maybe someone like me would have no real no idea so one of the quickest ways to make yogurt is a you super heat it so you heat it up to a temperature it's called ultra high pasteurization so it's at a high temperature pretty much kills everything and then it goes through a pretty much a tube system to cool down and get cultured and then it gets into a cup it's sealed and it becomes yogurt in the cup it's like it becomes yogurt it's liquid and then comes yogurt in a cup okay whereas ours is compared to that is a slow cook method we cook at a slow lower slower temperature we take it longer time to cool down and we have to have it outside so that's kind of the different kind of the comparison of the method so you could make yogurt in half an hour with one method and it takes you a week with the other that's pretty much the biggest difference it's funny man so beer making is very similar so if you like a lot of beer that people buy at the store they don't realize how processed it is and so if you're making beer same same concept higher temperatures you can add bacteria you can add co2 to it on purpose just to get the bacteria moving faster and then it'll take you maybe let's just say a day to make a keg whereas if you're using the best example is like old belgian methods where it ages on its own and so it ferments for a week weeks right and so the bacteria hangs out for three months before you actually before you're actually serving it and so again the difference there is but there's no preservatives there's nothing there's no added and so you have a natural beer in three months or you have a quick beer in like a week and this is the real difference that brewery struck so it sounds super similar one is super delicious and it i think if you wait long enough that's the reaction you'll get of like oh i don't like yogurt but this is great oh i don't drink i don't drink beer but this one's different and it's because it actually is different right it's fundamentally different it's it's how it's supposed to be it's how it was meant to be made you know it was traditionally a method to preserve milk so that's what we were doing you know we're trying to keep it you know it's preserving milk in a different way yeah and the flavor tastes the quality you get the flavor of the milk more you know you're tasting more of the elements and then we take that same method with all the purées and fruits we make we try that we're not using any colors or flavors so that plays to the problem with our our fruit as well because a lot of fruit oxidizes so like strawberries for example go brown so it's hard you know rhubarb is one that does goes brown a lot too so all these flavors we use we're trying to make sure that we have color you know colors a big pipe of what it looks like without compromising what we want to do you know with no preservatives no colors on their additives it's just how food's meant to be and even that changes too because you can have in one season you know a certain apple might put off more color than a different season i've seen that in the beer making world too well i like that at least the commitment yeah you got to go big on that you got to lean into the education of that big time i mean that's the whole company yeah that's one thing that you just reminded me of is even subtle changes in the milk depending on the season so the cows might you know winters see whether cows are eating difference in the seasons changes kind of the flavor of the milk and every so often we have this i don't know everything seems to align like the milk tastes right incubated well you know and we've got the right blend and then we get this like gold star blend of yogurt that came out so whenever i taste that batch i always send the message out to the production team that this is a you know this is a vintage batch that just came out and it's it's almost like champagne we want to be able to you know celebrate that this this if you're going to eat yogurt this week make sure you go right now you know this is a good batch yeah i love that yeah that's amazing man but it makes it hard to scale but that's okay because at least you got the right thing and it sounds like you got the right team yeah we've got a really good team now especially with uh with daniel levetski we were able to get a pretty strong uh executive team now so instead of us uh von bulb me and my dad uh wearing all the hats we've got a pretty solid team that's able to help us grow and scale yeah what has that been like for you so all of a sudden you went from like doing everything now you have executives in the room who are proven leaders but they're not always right that's kind of the hard part right they come with a lot of experience but to me like data changes right data at one point isn't data today uh has that been difficult has that been kind of not easier than you might have thought data was something i don't think we we had a hundred percent hold on what people were looking at i didn't realize everyone was all about the we realized quickly that you know our industry was all about velocities so how many units per store per skew per week was what everyone was looking for and we were killing it in seattle so that's why we got so much attention i think but to us we were just seeing what the sales hours or has always been make more yogurt make the best yogurt sales and our team kind of has helped us figure out what the landscape is i think everything else is about understanding different aspects of it that we weren't doing it ourselves you know and it's going to be integral to the success and the future growth of alinas making so that we're building up a strong not only the executive team but our whole like elimos family from the from the person that's cooking the milk to the person that's scooping up high place we want to make sure that they understand that our company got started by it with a lot of passion you know and avon with avon and a lot of family values and i think we want to make sure that team understands that completely as we grow and scale and i think if we keep on doing that elinos will be able to take over the us i think so i'm excited to try it when it comes to i guess how you guys view the future is there a d2c play or is it just tried and true of being in the store we've tried to do some d2c it's just hard shipping a you know a pretty great product directly to customers i think we'll be working we'll definitely be trying to work on something just to get to customers with maybe some shipping but i think it's trying to figure out what what works without paying an exorbitant amount of shipping fees to get it you know six cups of yoga to do that's the hard part with the almond they were they were shipping it with like dry ice and it just doesn't i mean it's it's great don't get me wrong but it's expensive right you're all of a sudden now paying 12 extra for shipping or 20 extra for shipping and it's also not sustainable and so there's a lot of people that don't like it frankly it's big and bulky but maybe maybe the strategy is you guys do a bunch of gelato stands or gelato type right just like you do in pike's place and instead of shipping that becomes your your conduit i think that's what our next try was to be these like the farmers markets we have like little gelato carts they have like a little bicycle attachment on it and we're going to be doing those in a kind of pop-ups in different parts of the country so i'm doing one in dallas we're going to do one in la shortly and then probably as we enter new markets we'll probably start to see some of them pop up around the place and that's probably somewhere where people can come down they can talk to us because yeah we're the ones that make it you can ask us any questions about yoga then we'll be able to explain exactly what's all about you know it's funny too because coming out of covid there's a lot of flexibility now in real estate where it's like these these landlords are forced to do something creative or just create areas or rent out the building for a week or a weekend where they just pop up friendly which i think allows a lot of companies to just experiment and say hey look let's try it let's do a pop-up and if it goes well maybe we consider a retail strategy or maybe not but it's a you know the litmus test is super fast the feedback cycle there is quick yeah i think and then the issue that we're having at the moment with these things is what's it like in a post uh you know pandemic year as well the people are people out and about and i think so far from what i've seen especially in dallas it's that people are wanting to go out and try new things and be outside it's a nice time of year so yeah i think i'm a little more confident now that we will be able to do something like that next few months yeah yeah i think everyone's tired of it at least here in la i can i look around and it's just like whoa everyone's out and obviously the weather is like perfect now and so people are just over staying at home and want to interact and now all the single people are just dying to meet other people and so the zoom dating is is over which is funny i think it's been a difficulty with these yes it's even working remotely talk it's not the same as being in you know in the factory or you know being able to talk to people one-on-one i didn't think that either doesn't translate the same way yeah and kind of puts everything on pause but i think we're in for a good year i totally agree well listen man tell everyone where they can find you where they can support the company all that good stuff so if you want to find somewhere close to you uh check our website out ellenos.com or uh you're pretty much your local Whole Foods if you're in one of our regions down in LA it's Bristol Farms or uh you can find us at Nuggets as well and uh North Cal Seattle it's a Metmarket my wife loves Bristol Farms she loves Bristol Farms so i'm gonna go i'm gonna go and get this tomorrow that's good stuff yeah thank you very much yeah Alex thanks for coming on the podcast brother i wish you nothing but success i'm excited i love that you guys are committing and staying true to your product and really leaning into just making sure people get the best experience i feel like a lot of companies take shortcuts on that path and it sounds like you're not doing that which is which is great i mean it's honest and it's the best experience for the consumer all right thank you very much it was great to talk to you too