Progress Over Perfection: Using Community to Fast-track Your CPG Brand with Michelle Cordeiro-Grant
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Building Your CPG Brand…
There are so many things to keep in mind when building a brand, but here’s one you might not have considered: community. What would it feel like to crowdsource everything and end up with a fabulous product that everyone loves?
In this episode, I’m interviewing Michelle Cordeiro-Grant, founder of LIVELY, and founder and CEO of Gorgie. Michelle shares how she built her brand with community, how she was able to fast track her energy drink from idea to shelf, and how she prioritizes self-care as a CEO.
Michelle also reminds us to let go of fear and to value progress over perfection. It’s OK to not know where your brand will take you. What’s important, though, is to never give up.
Subscribe to the Food Means Business Podcast with Hudson Kitchen founder Djenaba Johnson-Jones to hear the personal stories and “secret ingredients” of abandoning your day job and starting a CPG food business.
In this episode, you’ll learn...
[01:03] Michelle’s transition from corporate employee to starting two businesses
[06:46] How to use community to build your brand
[11:17] The 4 reasons Michelle was able to move from idea to selling product in stores so quickly with her energy drink, Gorgie
[14:40] How fashion has influenced Michelle’s business and who her target audience is
[18:30] How Michelle prioritizes self-care and how she was able to move through the fear of putting herself and her businesses out there
If you want to hear more about how to build your brand with community, be sure to tune into this episode:
Links mentioned in this episode…
About Michelle Cordeiro-Grant:
Michelle Cordeiro-Grant is the founder and CEO of GORGIE, founder of LIVELY, angel investor, podcast host and permanently glass half-full!
Connect with Michelle:
Connect with Michelle on LinkedIn
Stay Connected with Djenaba Johnson-Jones:
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[00:00:00] Djenaba You are listening to the Food Means Business Podcast, which features the personal stories and secret ingredients behind what it's like to abandon your day job to start a CPG food and beverage business. I'm Djenaba Johnson-Jones, former marketing executive turned entrepreneur and founder of food business incubator Hudson Kitchen. Join our community of fellow food business owners and subject matter experts to learn and laugh with us as we explore a startup world that's a little more culinary and a lot less corporate these days. Hello, Michelle. Welcome to the Food Means Business podcast. We're so happy to have you here.
[00:00:37] Michelle Thanks so much for having me. Such a pleasure.
[00:00:40] Djenaba Thank you. I would love to hear your story, but I have to tell you first, like my program manager and I are fangirls of you.
[00:00:48] Michelle Love that.
[00:00:49] Djenaba We've been following you for a long time. Liz actually used to work for Black Hole, so we really are. We know what's going on with you. But I want you to tell everyone here all about your kind of transition from being a corporate employee to now starting two businesses. We'd love to hear that.
[00:01:03] Michelle Sure. Sure. So it all started in rural Pennsylvania, to be honest. I was born and raised in New Smithville, and brands were kind of the way that I connected with people around me. Looking back, I didn't know it at the time. However, I realized that if I saw people wearing a certain brand, that was a way that I could connect with them. So fast forward work for the biggest brands in retail. I love to say Federated, VF Corp, Victoria's Secret, and so I don't have my MBA. I got my retail MBA by working for them.
[00:01:34] Djenaba You did.
[00:01:34] Michelle And after about a decade and a half, I realized that social media was happening. Society was shifted, but the way brands were being built was not. And thinking back to that girl in Pennsylvania, there wasn't a brand that really showed different types of people, looks of people, etc. But when I looked at social media is like, there it is. These new billboards actually show what humans actually look like. So what if we reverse engineered all of this? What if we built a brand on social media and in real life communities and then decided what the marketing, the words, the images and the products should be? So that was my first brand, was lively, never was supposed to work in my mind. This had a 60% failure rate, 40%, maybe probably 20%, like survived past five years. But what actually happened is we crowdsourced everything, didn't actually sell our first product until six months after starting the brand and we went viral. We got 133,000 emails, 48 hours. 280,000 unique sessions globally. And shipped to every state of America at 45 days.
[00:02:49] Djenaba I mean, because really the brand, it was all about me. I'm a customer and really just you definitely see yourself for sure. So that definitely came through. Yeah.
[00:02:58] Michelle Oh, I love to hear that. That's amazing. That's amazing. So yeah, that was brand one. I never thought I would do it too, because that was hard.
[00:03:08] Djenaba But brand one informed brand two, right? Because that's the thing is like all I keep thinking now is I've started this business, I should start another business and I would do it better because I have experience in doing this, have done it before.
[00:03:19] Michelle Yeah. And it took me years to realize that brand building was what I wanted to do consistently. Like I thought that with Lively lightning struck, It was such a serendipitous situation. It was very hard. But building a brand and having it acquired in less than four years, actually three years was quite a ride. And you question whether you could have a second act after something so interesting and profound, especially for my life and my family. But what I realized happened was I got deja vu. I saw, you know, with intimates. Intimates was $13 billion in the United States, with Victoria's Secret having 30 to 40% market share. And society for me wasn't really evolving the way that Victoria's Secret was still standing still. And that was lively. So now I saw another sector energy, $20 billion in the United States with a huge kegger and like health in terms of how it's growing. Yet when you look at the legacy brands and where the market share is on the shelf, it's a different message than where I am and what society is saying on Instagram and TikTok. TOK So what if we asked the world again and said, What do you want that can look like? What do you want the drink to taste like? And more importantly, how do you want it to make you feel? So Gorgie was born.
[00:04:41] Djenaba So you could have gone into anything, honestly. I mean, you've had so much success, so why energy drinks? And I understand there was an opportunity, but you could have chosen anything else.
[00:04:52] Speaker 3 Yeah.
[00:04:52] Michelle Yeah. And trust me, if you look at the boards behind me, it's one of many brands that I build in my brain, and my GoDaddy account has way too many URLs. I explored so many different things, but none of them kept me up at night. What did keep me up at night was wellness. And so I turned 40 during the pandemic and I started to pay attention to what I was truly eating, how I was sleeping, I was exercising, and I was like feeling like Benjamin Button. I was like, I'm aging backwards. This is amazing. I didn't see that same accessibility across America. And I'm like, Hold on, something's here. And I felt like, Well, what if I could take what I know about fashion and. Brand building and apply it to wellness and make wellness truly fun and visual and approachable and exciting. I actually started with powders and candy and pills. That's what the first version of Gorgie was, was, Oh, we're going to put this powder or drink or we're going to eat this piece of candy. But when I would Google survey on my phone, two out of three minute survey that I was sent out to everybody, everyone kept saying, I want a drink. I want a ready to drink. Michelle. I want a ready to drink guy. So then I'm in Florida and I'm seeing energy drinks everywhere I go. And I'm like, Wow, if I could just make this product for me taste good and feel good. I kept asking myself, Why don't I drink that? Oh, because they have tori Erythritol like all these things that feel bad for me. What if I could change that? And so that's honestly where it happened. Summer of '22.
[00:06:26] Djenaba And it's a beautiful brand. I'll be honest. The first thing I thought when I saw it, I was like, I think you can put vodka in there. And it would taste really good.
[00:06:35] Michelle Rumor has it.
[00:06:37] Djenaba Rumor has it that it's healthy and it tastes good with vodka.
[00:06:40] Michelle A particular girl. But choose your flavor.
[00:06:46] Djenaba Okay. There you go. So let's talk about community. You know, it's really important. I know within building a brand, it was important for me. Actually did it on accident as I was building Hudson Kitchen wanted to. I was going to open this kitchen. It was having a lot of trouble finding a location. And I was like, Let me just start to get people together. And it was the best thing that I ever did because in addition to serving them and having events, I got a lot of feedback. I spoke to hundreds of entrepreneurs before we even opened our doors, before I even secured financing, before all those things. It was so great. And the best type of market research. I'd love to hear about how you use community to build your brand.
[00:07:21] Michelle Yeah, I mean, so the idea literally came up, I would say the summer of '22, but it was in August when I built my first brand board was in August on literally a board that looks like this behind me that I bought at Staples. And then the idea kept me up every single night since my birthday on August 3rd. So finally, by August 27th, I found an intern that she's just like way beyond her years and way beyond an intern. But I was like, Hey, Erica, I had this idea. I can't stop thinking about it. Let's put it up on TikTok. And she did the weekend before Labor Day last summer, put it up on TikTok, and we got 100,000 likes in two weeks.
[00:07:56] Djenaba Wow.
[00:07:57] Michelle And I was like, okay, like, this is legit. And so then I started pushing that ball forward very quickly and found myself in Philadelphia the week before Expo East hosting happy hours in Philadelphia. Now, my second intern, I was like, you live next door to my mother in law, but also probably drink energy drinks and have amazing friends that could be like the first cohort of a quote unquote focus group. But she was incredible. She hosted a happy hour in Philadelphia, and these girls love the drink. They were so invested in naming them. They were making mixers and cocktails and okay. Then I took it to Expo East and this is where it gets really interesting. There was no can. There was nothing. Right. There was an image of what it can look like. And then the liquid in a glass bottle.
[00:08:44] Djenaba Right.
[00:08:46] Michelle That was like I scored a press pass because I'm like, expo badges are like, hard to come by and put the drink in a modern picnic bag, which is a first that is actually a yeti on the inside. So I went in with my drink and had little tasting cups and passed it out to anyone that I could find. And my partner, Jason Cohen, who was behind Veggie Straws and Skinny Pop, etc., was nice enough to introduce me to John Lawson and John Lawson of Whole Foods is like, This is a great product, let's have breakfast. And that like spiraled into our first foray of retail interest. So I came back to Florida and then it was like, go time, hired my first employee, got the drink into the kitchen, went to Art Basel, lights out, people loved it, Got so much feedback at Art Basel in December that we actually changed our formulation before we went into Whole Foods in January.
[00:09:41] Djenaba Oh, wow. Wow.
[00:09:42] Michelle I mean, that's how fast this happens. You really need an energy drink for that.
[00:09:50] Djenaba You do need an energy drink for that, for sure. You were like speeding. It's crazy. Yeah, it's great. So with the community, they informed everything. So from the style of can that you use to the colors of everything into and was that primarily through social media?
[00:10:06] Michelle Yeah. And so like if you actually look at the back of our can you'll see that it literally was created by followers and friends. This was our early version. So you see that we had like 200 milligrams and we have bcaas. And what we learned is actually at our focus groups in our events that we changed to 150 milligrams and we removed the bcaa because that didn't matter to them. And the magnesium it like really focused on the B's, the biotin and then the also the overall taste we were refining along the way, too. So it wasn't like we had the perfect liquid in September. We had, I would say, like a B plus by November and A minus by December. We got to an A-plus in January.
[00:10:48] Djenaba That's really great. It just goes to show you should just get started and just see how it goes and what happens with iterate along the way and look where you end up in Whole Foods or in other places, I'm sure.
[00:10:58] Michelle Yeah, it's a total progress over perfection. That's my mantra these days.
[00:11:02] Djenaba From idea to kind of the first cans in stores. How long did it take you?
[00:11:08] Michelle August to January.
[00:11:10] Djenaba Wow. Oh, my gosh.
[00:11:14] Michelle Literally like we incorporated in September.
[00:11:17] Djenaba So can I ask you, like, what enabled you to go that fast? And I understand you obviously have a background in entrepreneurship. You've been very successful. You're able to, you know, find a partner. But what was it that enabled you to go fast? That was that's still fast.
[00:11:29] Michelle It's super fast. I would say there's probably three things. Number one, I had the mental adrenaline and stability to do it right. Like entrepreneurship is a total mental muscle. Because we're human beings and we're built to survive and so we focus on the negative, we're always trying to fix the things out there verses just like go. So that's why I say progress over perfection. Number one, it was mentally ready for it. Number two is I was super comfortable not knowing like I just knew I was going to figure it out. Like if you think about it, it was me and an intern and my partner, Jason. We had no people, nothing, right? But we knew based on our experience that you just figure it out. It all comes together. Number three, Jason Cohen is my strategic partner and he comes from the snack and beverage industry. And when you look at the beverage industry, it is very much a boy's club. And so as a female, getting into the clubhouse is like no joke. But when you have someone who is so caring and thoughtful but like, truly believes in you, it gave me the conviction to just like, barrel right in and say like, Hello, guys, I'm Michelle. I'm at the Ritz next to the Expo East biggest trade show outside of Expo West and sitting there at that bar, there was not one other woman there. It was me.
[00:12:48] Djenaba Wow.
[00:12:49] Michelle And the great news about that is I stuck out and people are like, Who are you? What are you doing here? Oh, hi, Michelle. Oh, hi. You know, and then, you know, I said three things, but actually the fourth thing is truly believing your product will be incredible by the time it gets on the shelf. So don't just create something and then try and sell that as the thing. Create something to iterate until it is on the shelf. Don't be shy.
[00:13:16] Djenaba I love that. I love that. I love that. So it's all about really the unknown. It's like you in the belief. I've been thinking about that a lot just in my own business. I used to get up in the morning and go, Okay, you can do this. I didn't know. I've never owned a food business, had never done a construction project before. We end up doing 8000 square feet of space and like some craziness and but we just did it and you just have to keep moving forward and one foot in front of the other every day.
[00:13:42] Michelle Yeah, this is a really weird analogy, but I was terrified to have kids when I had my daughter. I remember having to walk back into the hospital and my husband and I were like, Well, how do you change your diaper? Do we bathe her, like when do we bathe her? I was the girl that held a baby and it would instantly cry. And so I'm like, if I could figure out motherhood, I think I could figure out how to create a beverage business.
[00:14:04] Djenaba I think it's the same. You do this thing, you don't know what you're doing, you're figuring it out as you go along. You're going to make some mistakes, you're going to figure it out, and there's going to be some successes along the way as well. And as long as the child is alive, at the end of the day.
[00:14:19] Michelle We've done our job. You won. I know, I'm always like, wait, I started my first company after I had my daughter. So I'm like, if I can make human beings, whoa, like, what else can I do? And the same thing here. It's like you're just trying to survive. You just want to feed that kid.
[00:14:38] Michelle And hope they sleep.
[00:14:40] Djenaba I love how and I understand everything was crowdsourced, but I love how fashionable the drink actually is. Because if you look at energy drinks on a shelf, especially in like a traditional grocery store, it's a bunch of like bright green and black and red and just very different and very artificial looking. And the fact that you've come up with something that is both beautiful and tastes good is quite amazing. Can you talk about how fashion's influenced the business?
[00:15:05] Michelle Totally. Yeah. I believe that brand is really about impacting human psyche, so it starts visually and the visuals pull you into the story. It's like a movie trailer. It's like, Whoa, what's that? Then you want to learn more, you want to see more, you want to hear more. And so like, we really felt like thinking about like what does Gorgie actually look and feel like? And we wanted to create this spark of happiness, of wellness. And so you'll always see disco balls everywhere we go and the team was always like, Why disco balls, Michelle? I'm like, Show me one human that if they see a disco ball, they can't smile.
[00:15:38] Djenaba It's the truth.
[00:15:40] Michelle The disco ball equals happiness. And so then I was like, Well, what are the other elements? We actually created a magazine, which I'll find one. But the team again was like, Why a magazine? I was like, When you think about fashion and you think about branding, where do you ultimately want to be? Right? The key to success in fashion is Vogue.
[00:15:58] Djenaba Yes, absolutely.
[00:16:00] Michelle Why don't we create our own Vogue? Why don't we create a magazine that actually tells the story? What did the founder know, and the Good Energy Club and like why we actually exist. But like, think about the biggest brands in the world. They use all the same elements. They were in fashion magazines. They told stories with visuals. They were so succinct on their words. And that's what we're doing here. It's like, What if I took everything that I learned in fashion and beauty just brought it to the beverage shelf? I think it could work. And then if you think about the can, what if the can actually became the new Instagram? It's like the light bulbs, right?
[00:16:37] Djenaba Yeah, it's actually fantastic. Can you talk a little bit about your target audience? And I'm assuming mostly women that are actually drinking the product, Like I saw your TikTok and they're all they're so beautiful and and having a great time. Yeah, Yeah. I'd love to hear about them. How you describe the customer.
[00:16:53] Michelle Yeah, the customer is whoever is interested in energy meets wellness meets fun. And so our mantra is we are a brand built by women. But in my second chapter, it's by wmen for all. And I think like the first generation of female founders were by women for women. And I think now I'm on a mission to demonstrate that we can create female led female visual companies that will actually be for all. And so Gorgie is being consumed 60% of the time by women, 40% of the time by men. There's a little secret Instagram account everyone called Gorgie Guys and the bio is: Good guys drink Gorgie.
[00:17:35] Djenaba I love that.
[00:17:38] Michelle And so you think about like car brands, they're very much male focused, but who drives them? Everybody. Right? And so why can't that happen more often with a brand building in general? So who is the customer? We started with a lot of females, of course, in fashion and fitness in college. We've been on 40 college campuses for New York Fashion Week parties and events to Super Bowl parties. And we'll be at Wimbledon. We actually were at the Chargers NFL draft party, and you're actually starting to see us on more and more golf courses. And so our mission is actually happening faster than we thought. 150 cases were at Harvard on April Fools. It's such a flexible product beverage, but at the end of the day, we want to be a can that can be in anyone's hand. Female, male, doesn't matter. It's whoever needs an energy boost and really cares about wellness.
[00:18:30] Djenaba So speaking of wellness, can you talk about what you do to take care of yourself? I feel like as a founder, we sometimes put ourselves last because the business and then the other things that may be going on in life. So I'd love to hear what you do and how you've been able to prioritize yourself.
[00:18:44] Michelle Yeah, you know, I always think about what they tell you on the plane. Put your oxygen mask on first. I would say for my first company, I didn't learn this until far too long down the path. But for this act now, I know the mental muscle is number one and for your mental muscle to ultimately be strong, I can't compromise on sleep. Must sleep. Number two, exercise equals endorphins. So I think it's Matthew McConaughey, but break a sweat every day, even if it's 10 minutes.
[00:19:11] Djenaba I'm with you there. Yes.
[00:19:12] Michelle Just give yourself what it needs. Sometimes you'll see me sprint through the neighborhood and back just to get that like 10 minutes, because that's all I have. But I'll always like really put my sleep and fitness and nourishing my body with the right foods first because then I can show up for everybody.
[00:19:30] Djenaba Yeah, that makes so much sense.
[00:19:32] Michelle And the other thing is like, it's okay to say no. As founders, that's like the hardest part.
[00:19:37] Djenaba It's so hard because you're thinking, okay, I put this thing out there, people are responding. There's all these opportunities coming at me. I need to take advantage of all of them because maybe one day there won't be any opportunities.
[00:19:50] Michelle Totally. Yeah. And then I think the other thing I learned with this brand, baby number two in the business side is it's okay to delegate and it's okay for things to not be perfect, Progress over perfection. Like my OCD-ness was off the charts at Lively, off the charts. And here I'm like, okay, let it roll, create the guidelines, great. The cohesiveness and the discipline, but also let people work within their frameworks and stretch.
[00:20:17] Djenaba Right. No, that makes much sense. You've created these two businesses, both very successful, and sometimes putting yourself out there can be kind of scary. Can you just talk about how you were able to kind of move through the fear?
[00:20:30] Michelle Yeah. Honestly, my first one with Lively, I found out I was pregnant two months after launching. So that was a doozy. So I wasn't feeling good. You just don't feel like you look good. And I kind of hid a little bit and then started to push myself into the press and kind of, like, come from behind the curtain. I was the wizard for a while. Now I am unapologetically me, like you see, I got a top knot in because I went running this morning and most of the time I don't have makeup on. I very seldom get dressed up. But if I do, I love the peacock and I'll have like tons of structured outfits and things like that. Once you're comfortable with who you are, it doesn't matter any more. Like you can show up anywhere. Like I just did a TED talk, which I've never done like a TED X, and I was terrified and I was like, What are you doing? Why am I scared? I do this. I love to talk for a living, but because it was like there was rules at a time limit and so forth, I started to get fearful. I was like, Hold on, it's gonna be fine. And what I realized is I just picked out different people in the audience that I would make eye contact with. And I'm like, Oh, I'm in a conversation with you, and now you and now you. But it all starts with being comfortable with who you are. It's like, I'm Michelle. I barely wear makeup. Not just glass half, I'm glass half overflowing.
[00:21:47] Djenaba I love that. I love that. So, Michelle, tell us what you're celebrating. We here at Hudson Kitchen have in our lobby a money bell that we ring when people are celebrating anything. I call it a money bell, but like, it's anything to celebrate. Could be a new retail partner. It could be some employee got their paycheck, Like, whatever it is, it's like we would love to hear anything personal or professional that you're celebrating right now.
[00:22:06] Michelle Yeah. Yeah. I would say personally, I feel like I found my glass half full. Like, I get to brand build, I have two beautiful children, my husband still makes my heart flutter. And so I feel like I finally found my glass half full. On the business side, Gorgie was an idea on a phone in August, and I could, like, literally cry thinking about the fact that we will be national June first.
[00:22:33] Djenaba Amazing.
[00:22:34] Michelle Like what? This was an idea in my head on a run, and now it will be on shelves nationally.
[00:22:41] Djenaba Congratulations. Amazing.
[00:22:43] Michelle Joke about.
[00:22:48] Djenaba It's true. It's not a joke. It's real. Thank you so much for being here with love for you to let everybody know where they can find out about you and Gorgie.
[00:22:58] Michelle Yes. So our sweet G, Gorgie, is at getgorgie.com and getgorgie on all your favorite social handles. And I'm at the_michellegrant.
[00:23:10] Djenaba Thank you so much. The Food Myth Business podcast was produced by Hudson Kitchen. It is recorded at the studio at Carney Point and mixed and edited by Wild Home podcasting. Our theme song is by Damien de Sandys, and I'm your host, Djenaba Johnson-Jones. Follow Hudson Kitchen on Instagram at thehudsonkitchen and to get Food Business Bites right in your inbox, sign up for our newsletter at thehudsonkitchen.com/newsletter. Listen, follow and leave a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get podcasts. Until next time.