Podcast: Ayla & Co’s guide to competing with dupes

Once a month, Utah Business hosts Founder Friday, a free event that showcases the wisdom of Utah-based founders. In September, Kiln hosted a conversation between Utah Business Executive Editor Catherine Bennett and the founders of Ayla & Co, Nikki and Brody Day. This event was sponsored by Kiln and Northwestern Mutual.

Listen to this episode of the Utah Business podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Transcript:

Catherine Bennett: Welcome to Founder Friday. If you don’t know, this is a live podcast event, so this conversation will live on forever. No pressure. Nikki, Brody and I really wanted to be mindful today and set the stage for the conversation that we’re going to have. We know it’s been a hard week, it’s been a heavy week, and we’re still feeling that. But I was looking at some of the messaging around Ayla & Co and it stood out to me that it’s for life’s messy moments, that we all have messy moments, and messy is not the right word to describe this week at all. However, you’ve also had a crazy week. Aside from the events that we’ve all experienced, I think we can relate to that as business owners and as leaders in this room. Just take us through this week for you.

Nikki Day: I like that you brought up the messaging behind our brand, because the name Ayla at its roots means “from a strong and resilient place.” So to me, it just really represents parenthood, life. Everything’s messy. Always, when you have kids, everything’s messy. Our week started off with getting a phone call from our kids’ school that he had smashed his hand in a door, broke his hand, and then passed out and hit his head on a metal door frame and had a concussion. So it was one of those days. That was on top of multiple other things. I also had another kid home from school sick. Our car even got towed. It was just a Monday.

Nikki Day: That’s kind of what life is, and those by no means compared to other events that happened this week. But just in general, life is messy, and we show up. That’s the brand messaging behind Alya, is being strong, resilient, and perseverant in messy and hard situations.

Catherine Bennett: Take us back to 2020, because you launched during COVID. What did you know? What month was it? Was COVID already happening? Had you already started and you couldn’t stop?

Nikki Day: We started product development probably mid to late 2019, so we were very committed at this point. We had sold property to invest in this company, and we were very much like, “We’re doing this.” Product development took over a year, and then our Kickstarter launched in September of 2020, which was well into COVID. A pretty tricky time to launch a business, in general, with lots of other things going on in our life at that time too that made it a very difficult, unique challenge.

Catherine Bennett: Tell us about how this started and why you wanted to tackle the messy moments. What were you experiencing as a mom that you thought, yeah, I go all in on.

Nikki Day: We had four kids in four years. We had three in diapers, and I went through a lot of diaper bags and just, there wasn’t any that I loved. There were some that were really fashionable that I felt like I liked to carry around, but I couldn’t find anything in them. They felt like an empty pit. I had one that was really organized, but it was this floral pattern that screamed diaper bag, and I just felt like I had to sacrifice my sense of style with motherhood.

Brody Day: What she really was worried about was me carrying around the floral diaper bag.

Nikki Day: We kind of toyed around with the idea of, like, “Man, I could do this so much better.” And I mean, I felt like I had ideas, we just sat on it for a while. Then a point came where we had to graduate to minivan status. And I told Brody, if I’m going to have to drive a minivan, because that’s the only thing that really fits four ginormous car seats, I’m going to drive a nice minivan. So we got a nice minivan, and it had this little portable vacuum system. And at first I was like, “This is dumb. I will never use this.” And then I ended up using it like every day. I could vacuum out my stroller and their car seats no matter where I was. But the problem was it didn’t reach everywhere, so it’s kind of limited to that space. And I just kept thinking, “What if I had something everywhere I went?” Because my kids make messes everywhere. I don’t know about your kids, but airports, restaurants, messes everywhere. And I thought, “What if we had this little, tiny vacuum that didn’t look like a vacuum that fit in this diaper bag that you could carry with you everywhere?” And so at that point, we really realized, like, there’s nothing like that out there. We did a lot of market research, and I was like, “OK, I feel like at this point, we’re going to regret not trying more than we’re going to regret trying and failing.” So the vacuum really kind of pushed us over the edge, and we jumped into the product development world.

Catherine Bennett: You alluded to the craziness of the world in general but also of your world. What other things just in your personal life and your family were happening at the time?

Nikki Day: 2020 is not a year I like to look back on — none of us do, let’s be honest. But in March of 2020 COVID just hit, and kids just got sent home from school. Our daughter got diagnosed with epilepsy, and she was having upwards of 100 seizures a day at one point, and then we ended up homeschooling our kids that year, just for health reasons as well. So not only were we launching a business, we were learning to navigate a very new medical diagnosis, and I was a full-time school teacher to four children with no experience in that realm at all, and launching a business. In September, two weeks before the Kickstarter launched, Brody lost his job unexpectedly, so we kind of went from saying, “Let’s try this out and see where it goes,” to “We need to make this work.” And also, you’re going to be a school teacher and so 2020 was really difficult, and to look back and see what we made it through is something we’re really proud of.

Catherine Bennett: Do you look back and think maybe all those things had to happen to push us to do this?

Nikki Day: Maybe, I think both of us are the type of personality that we step up to the plate when there’s something that needs to be done. And in those situations, with your kids and with your job or with your commitments, we just showed up every day and it paid off.

Catherine Bennett: How did all those experiences shape you? I imagine you go through something like what you did with your daughter, and it changes you. It changes the way you approach things, or the way you see your family. How did just that entire time period affect the way that you approach business and family and balance, I don’t like that word, “balance” — harmony?

Nikki Day: Balance is never achievable. I think we have both gone through a fair share of difficult events in our life, and especially when you see your children going through something that you can’t control or really help with at all, and even medical professionals don’t know a whole lot about why and what causes things and what triggers certain kinds and you feel really helpless. But going through a lot of these things gives you a new perspective on life and going for the things, reaching for your dreams and taking control. You get to decide your life; things are going to happen and you’re going to have challenges, even through those challenges, to see how our daughter navigated a lot of these things. It’s just really inspiring to see how people move through those types of things.

Catherine Bennett: Brody, what were you going through at this time? What was your thought process? What are you thinking about?

Brody Day: Humans are incredibly resilient, especially watching your child go through some ailments and I don’t ever want to downplay what we go through, but someone always has it worse. That’s something that I feel, and as we’ve gone through things, it’s almost preparing for the next hard thing that you’re going to go through. But we’ve been very fortunate. And when these storms come and you can weather the storms and you can do it together, those things are huge. And having a good, strong inner circle is incredibly important. I don’t think that it’s good and healthy to try to do things on your own or try to start a business solo. I think you need community. I think you need a team. I think you need leadership and people to help, because it’s just too much for one person to bear. And that goes for personal matters, that goes for your business, and frankly, for everything you do.

Nikki Day: In the entrepreneurial world too, we found as we were navigating early product development, we didn’t have a lot of experience in this space, but we really found that everyone’s a cheerleader. People don’t gatekeep things in the entrepreneurial world; everyone is rooting for everyone. And everyone is really eager to bring value to people. I think that’s what’s such a great thing about this community. You don’t have to do it alone. You have a lot of people who are rooting for you.

Brody Day: Communication is free. Advice is free. You can go to people and ask, “Hey, what was that experience like? What did you go through? How did you get through that?” And most people, like Nikki has mentioned, are willing to share that and help someone else get through it easier or quicker.

Catherine Bennett: So you realize that you’re going all in on this endeavor together, because you’re, are you looking for a job at this point?

Brody Day: No, I had a job within a week. I was very fortunate. It was stressful but it worked out. That’s a four-hour story for a golf course. I’m happy to share it. It’s super dark and dreary and not wholesome, but it worked out. But really, it was really taxing on what we were trying to launch. I think that’s the highlight of all that. We were trying to do this smoothly and calmly, and then you just have another dart just coming.

Catherine Bennett: But even though you did get another job, you guys have been partners on this since the beginning. What did that partnership look like at the beginning, and how has it kind of evolved over time?

Brody Day: So starting the new job for the industry that I’m in, it’s a service industry, and it’s a big reset. I’m in the construction industry, but for us, a lot of people look at business, you’re going to go into your partners, your spouse. “Can you guys stay together? What happens if the business has turnovers, it gets your partner?” And what was fortunate for us is we are a great team. On a personal level, we are awesome friends, and we’re great business partners. The value that she brings to the business is unequivocal to me. I’m a cheerleader. I just have pom poms every day. That’s all I do.

Nikki Day: We bring different value to the business.

Brody Day: I want to fire everybody that’s not doing a good job. She wants to give them an extra few chances.

Nikki Day: I feel like though, you were really involved up front with the designing phases and ideation. It was great to get an outside perspective, especially from a different gender and a dad. Early on, you were really involved with all of that, and then as we’ve run the business for a few years, you’ve taken more of a back seat, but are still involved with big decisions and less of the everyday type of stuff.

Catherine Bennett: So let’s go back to you have the Kickstarter fund. You’re feeling good, I’m guessing, at this point.

Nikki Day: Yes it felt very validating.

Catherine Bennett: Yes. What happens next?

Nikki Day: We tried story purchasing. It was nice to have that validation, but then we quickly realized how expensive the product space is to keep up with demand and inventory, and we grew pretty fast, and that was a big challenge for us. Importing in general, there’s a lot of risks. My biggest fear was that one of our containers would fall into the ocean like that happens, you saw this week. There was a bunch that fell into the ocean in Long Beach. I always was really worried about that. And every time my container would land, I’d be like, “Okay, we’re good,” and I would feel less stressed. And then in 2021, we got the phone call that one of our containers had been stolen from the courtyards in the middle of the night. That was probably a million-dollar loss for us. Getting through that as a young business, businesses would have had to file bankruptcy. That was something that, when we look back I’m like, “How the heck did we do that?” That was one of the hardest phone calls I ever received.

Brody Day: And there were a couple silver linings. So when we started, it was one container. Back in 2020, when we were launching and doing our first set of imports, it was one container. And then, as we’ve been scaling between the end of 2020 and into 2021, we were doing two containers. The good news is one of the two was stolen, and it was the less valuable of the two. It was a horrible, huge loss to the business. You lose flow. You don’t get to capitalize on the sales. You have to really order immediately. You have colors that are out of stock. And we were marketing to the consumers our brand with these new colors and these new sizes coming out, pre-orders people are expecting, and we have to fulfill and deliver on these somehow. Losing this container was absolutely catastrophic. A couple of silver linings with it, but we’ve talked about some of the troubles and trials that we’ve gone through. That was the biggest one for the business. How we survived that, sometimes we look back and we’re like, “I don’t really know, but we did.” We pushed through it, and its been four years since that. The insurance companies found a loophole. I hate insurance. Sorry if anyone works for an insurance company.

Nikki Day: They scammed us. We got $14,000 back on that container. It was almost more of a slap in the face at that point. I thought, “I don’t even want that.”

Brody Day: The guy I was dealing with, I’ll never say his name, but he said, “If I had any advice for you, I would sue us for what’s going on right now.” Really weird. The lawyer fees of all that and dealing with lawsuits are super time consuming, and it’s just weird, because I had just gone through something in 2020 and the best advice I had gotten from one of my legal counsels was sometimes it’s just better just to abandon it and move on and focus on the future. Because if you sit here and dwell on all your woes and the hard things you went through and what hurt you and kicked you down, you’re going to lose sight of that. You can get back on your feet and just move forward in a good direction.

Nikki Day: I felt like, for me, mentally, I had to finally disconnect from that loss and not even talk about it anymore and find a way to move through because the more we know we’re upset about it, it just brings you down.

Catherine Bennett: What does stealing a container actually mean? What was actually happening? Someone just walked off with your container?

Brody Day: We have video footage of it all.

Nikki Day: In container yards when you bring containers in, lots of times, they can’t get to them that day or even that week, so they put them in a container shipyard until the next transportation can come pick it up. So in the middle of the night on a weekend, a semi-truck drove up and hooked up to our container and drove it out of the container shipyard and unpacked all the bags and abandoned the container and the truck. We know where those bags ended up. They ended up on resale sites, and we can see them. And it’s hard when you have customers who are like, “Yeah, I got mine off Makari,” or, you know, all these places. I just want to be like, “That is stolen property, literally someone’s life savings that someone stole from us.” It was hard to watch, but that’s how it happened. They just broke through the gate and drove a truck up and drove away with it, and we couldn’t recover any of it. We did not recover any of it. We worked closely with the sheriff’s department, but this stuff happens every day there. Usually they target containers that, things they can really easily sell, like bags or electronics or shoes. This happens every day.

Catherine Bennett: So is that what happened? People jumped ship from your site and found them elsewhere?

Nikki Day: We’d have people being like, “Hey, you can get this for half off on this site.” And it just was so discouraging, because obviously customers don’t know the story. We tried to be pretty transparent, but new people will find us and they’ll be like, “Yeah, I got mine for half off.” It’s just frustrating as a brand owner to watch that kind of stuff happen.

Brody Day: Their margins were huge, by the way; no customer acquisition costs. No nothing. Crazy. When I was working with the detective from the sheriff’s department, there were 80 stolen containers going on at the time, and we were super concerned about our one. It’s horrible that that’s the response you get from someone that’s supposed to be a steward over helping with this matter. They’re just overwhelmed by it. I’ve tried to get an order from the judge so that I can go and take these guys down. And the judge has a lot more pressing issues. It’s LA, I mean, they’re dealing with homicides and child trafficking and really, really horrible things. And I really care about my container of bags. We lost three or four thousand bags by the time we actually tracked down where it was being sold and put some stops to it. We wanted to recover the merchandise so we could recoup some of the dollars. But by the time we had figured some things out, they go dark, they go into hiding, and it’s hard to track them down again. So we don’t know. There might have been people that got thrown into jail over it. We never heard. It’s none of our business at this point.

Catherine Bennett: So did you have to process a bunch of returns? What was your customer’s response?

Nikki Day: We had a lot of pre-orders, and we had to refund people because lead times are three or four months, and dealing with pre-orders staying open that long is just more difficult than not. So we ended up just refunding people. It was really challenging. We were really fortunate to have options that helped us get through that. I don’t think many businesses would have gotten through that. So we were really fortunate. We were able to slowly recover, but that hit on our PNL [profit and loss] for a couple of years. It was very noticeable.

Brody Day: In that container, we were launching one new design feature and then a different color. So if there were any attempts for someone to make returns from sales that we didn’t actually make, it was very easy for us to go, “Oh, you didn’t buy that from us.”

Nikki Day: So people would reach out and want to return something they bought on a secondhand site, and we could easily look at the bag and be like, “That wasn’t one that you purchased from us because we actually never received that product.”

Catherine Bennett: Did you have a conversation around this time about just being done and just saying, “This is too much”?

Nikki Day: We had to. We had legal advice to file bankruptcy, because that would have probably been the smartest route at that point, financially, to recover. But like I said, we got really lucky with some investors that were willing to help us get through that.

Catherine Bennett: Let’s talk about the product development process that you guys went through. This is my first interaction with an Ayla & Co bag and you can tell the quality is amazing, just holding it and interacting with it. How did it play out originally? Was it the way that you envisioned, or what were the bumps along the way? How did you do that?

Nikki Day: So going into this, I had been running a different business, but it was a service-based industry. I had no experience with product development. I think that was really one of the things that held us back at first. I know how to run a business, but I do not know anything about product development. So I kind of touched on the value of networking. I have a brother who’s a patent attorney, and he was able to connect us with a company that specializes in this and really helps walk people through the product development process. I think we probably couldn’t have done it without that. They brought us in. We went through a year of ideation, different rounds of testing and prototypes. That first prototype when we got it back I was like, “I don’t know if we’re on the right path here.” And our parents would see and they’re like, “This is what you’ve spent all your money on?” But we knew this was just a very rough draft. You had to keep that in mind. But it took a year of several rounds to get where we wanted it to be. And it, I mean, it evolved over the years. Initially, we thought that the vacuum might be somehow attached like in our van. And then we realized that, no, this is a great product on its own. We need to have them separately; we can bundle them, but this is a really unique product that we need to put more attention into on its own.

Brody Day: And then as you’re developing and doing the design ideas, they grow, they improve. And there’s a special pocket just for the vacuum. It fits it perfectly. I wanted to rewind, though. So as we were trying to find product development options, that’s kind of an interesting part of the story, because you start calling random individuals, and say, “Hey, you’re an engineer. Can you help us with this?” And then you hit a dead end, and they recommend someone else. And then you’re wondering if you should have NDAs signed, because some guy might run off with your idea. There’s a lot of uncertainty there. When you’re starting a business, you’re just not sure where to go.

Nikki Day: Especially if you’ve never done it before in this space.

Brody Day: So the encouragement is to continue to tinker and explore and be open and listen to people and let them guide you and let them help you. And Nikki mentioned that her brother was very helpful with, “Hey, there’s this group that I work with, or have worked with, or know about,” and they were super established, and they were helpful. They were able to help bring this to life. The team that we got assigned with that was incredible. We get these people that take our idea, put it on paper, and then they’re drawing it and doing sketches and renderings. And we had several different options that we sorted through, and it’s kind of like a committee where we decide, okay, we’re going to rule those two options out and ride down this path, and then they do the prototype, and then we tinker with the prototype and change the pocket or just the zippers, or do a different material or a different metal here, and all those changes are super fascinating. There’s tons of them, and I think it’s critical to be very patient with that process because you don’t want to rush it. That [pointing to the bag] is not what the first one looked like, and taking inspiration and ideas from other people that have done things well, but also finding ways to improve it. If you unzip it down the middle and fold it out, it doesn’t fall over. And she mentioned the four or five diaper bags we went through, some of those things were points of pain for us that we thought, “Man, if only we had a bag that didn’t do that but still looked decent,” and that’s where her inspiration came from. And it’s her idea. It’s her brainchild.

Nikki Day: There’s a lot of details in it that just makes sense once you learn about them.

Catherine Bennett: Do you have any advice for finding that team that can help you develop a product? If you could go back, would you do it differently? Or do you feel like it worked out the way you hoped?

Nikki Day: I felt like our team was great. I always still recommend this brand. There’s a couple others here in Utah, but finding a team that works well for the type of product you want to develop, because this brand was very focused on a lot of baby products. So I felt like they understood what we were going for. And I think that’s probably the most important thing. And when you’re kind of shopping around, because there are a lot, finding one that has experience in that space was really helpful for us.

Brody Day: What was fascinating when we sat down with the idea, we came to them, Nikki’s big thing was, I have a bag, and he had already designed a few bags. The company was particularly interested in the vacuum. He said, “That’s unique. That’s different. Everyone can go and produce and make a bag and sell it,” but he saw the vacuum and he thought, “Ah, that’s patentable. And I like that.” So they did a ton of market research with us buying all these handheld vacuums we had, like a little ladybug one, that we were testing out and figuring out how much it costs and how well it could suck things up and it was horrible, but it was selling. Someone out there was buying this thing. This market research is fascinating because you’re trying to test to see if your idea has some substance to it and has some merit. And anyway, he was like, “Fine, we’ll do the bag for you but I love this vacuum idea,” and that became a patentable product for us. We have our own tooling for it with our factory overseas, and it’s been really cool to watch that. That wasn’t his vision, hers was the bag, the vacuum was an accessory to it, and it’s just been fascinating to just watch the brand develop and become what it is today, with differences of opinions, even within our own product development team. But it’s just been fun.

Catherine Bennett: I know there are people in earshot who have pending patents or have already patented something. What are your thoughts? What have you learned about patents?

Nikki Day: Patents are very cool and something to be proud of, but I think you have to look at patents with a grain of salt as well. And the reason I say that is I feel like anyone who gets a patent is just like, “Yay. No one will ever be able to copy this.” But, what’s the phrase? “The best form of flattery is imitation.” People will still do it, and it’s really discouraging. A patent will deter people a little bit, but it’s not a one-stop fixes-all. And so I always try to give people a little bit of a reality check with a patent. Unless you have millions to defend your patent, I still think it’s important to have but, you will have to have a lot of money to defend it in some situations. In our case, a lot of times, we haven’t had anyone with the vacuum, but with the bag. We’ve had knock-offs come up, and we started off with, like, lawyer fees and going after these people. And really a lot of our energy, you know, trying to stop these. We have a really great partnership with our current factory, and they actually were really great. They would go knock on the doors of these factories and they would get them to stop. So yeah, there were benefits of having a team in China. We did see some recourse from that. So the biggest part is keeping up with it all, and again, just where you’re going to spend your time and money and resources, but, having those options, a team in China that advocates for you was a big part of getting that to slow.

Brody Day: It’s weird, but having a subtle way of holding them accountable, just the feeling of someone watching, can change behavior. So them physically showing up, knowing that, “ey, we know what you did and we don’t like it,’ it can be a deterrent. So sometimes we win, sometimes we lose and sometimes we don’t care enough.

Nikki Day: Sometimes we’ll find a listing that they take down, and then we find it put up under a different name, but same factory. So some of them will continue to try, but we have a pretty persistent team in China, which is very helpful.

Brody Day: And here’s just some context on picking the battle. So one of these imitators had a hundred bags, and so not a lot of, not worth spending a lot more time continuing to make sure they stopped. Then there’s people that are doing thousands that took a little bit more of our time, and we made sure that there was something written with an agreement that ceased it. So there’s just a little context on the different types that come.

Nikki Day: And at the end of the day, it became more apparent that our money was better spent building up our own brand and building that brand loyalty rather than trying to tear others down and get them to stop copying our product. So I do think patents are really cool. It’s something to be proud of, and it does bring value to your business, but kind of looking at it in a whole picture of the purpose of that patent.

Brody Day: If you have something patentable, patent it for sure. Go do that. Do your patent searches; those are kind of expensive. Find out if your idea is already out there. Because when you have a patent, it actually helps with your credibility. So there’s something there for that. You guys have probably watched Shark Tank. There’s certain investors that love patentable ideas. It’s very attractive for them, because someone will ask, “What’s keeping me from just going out there and ripping you off and doing it better than you?” I would still recommend getting the patent. But it is not a silver bullet. There’s loopholes that people can find. They can do a slight change and then do a similar idea. But if you’ve got something that’s new or innovative and creative that can get patented, definitely go do it. Just know there’s going to be vultures that come and try to do weird things to you and your ideas and your business. And it’s no wonder when people build big companies or big brands they have legal departments and are full force at work. I wish we could afford to have somebody that just sits there and shuts down people that are trying to hurt our brand and our image and our business, or who are taking our ideas and doing the same exact thing. We’ve seen that same exact bag, same exact font, just different letters, branding in the same spot, and they said, “Oh, it’s my idea.”

Nikki Day: We’ve had people be like, “No, I designed this.” And I’m like, “There is no way you designed this.” So it’s been really frustrating. I always say the word of the year is “dupe.” Everyone wants the Lululemon dupe or the Free People dupe. Everyone is just looking for a cheaper option. There’s a market for that, but it also takes away from the people who did the hard work and the upfront work, and it is frustrating. But again, you have to look at a place of flattery, and we chose just to put all of our attention back into our brand and building that community and loyalty, because that goes a lot further than you know.

Catherine Bennett: So have you left it alone? Then when you see dupes, you kind of just let it be?

Nikki Day: We’ve taken a mixed approach over the years. First, we were very aggressive and we did get people to remove their listings and to dispose of their inventory. But like I said, the bills on our end are very costly. The attorney fees really add up, and at the end of the day, you have to ask, “Where is this money more valuable?’ And so there’s been some that we have just said, “Sell through your inventory,” and gotten a written agreement that they weren’t going to continue to produce them. We’ve also gone after the factories themselves, trying to stop them from promoting that they can make these bags. So we’ve taken kind of a roundabout approach. But yeah, it definitely makes you question, “where is our money best spent?”

Brody Day: It gets tricky when you’re doing product import because the laws in the U.S. are different from the laws in Asia. So we might want to say, “Hey, this is illegal here.” And they might, they might even be illegal in Asia. They don’t care in some of those countries. They’re just like, “Okay, what are you going to do about it?” And so fighting these fights, if we had a factory that we sampled from, and then they’re sitting here, they have our tech pack for how to make this exact bag. Even if they sign NDAs, they can breach them. And how do we go over and go to court with them and try to get the law to enforce something with these guys? It’s pretty defeating, but Nikki said it best: You can worry about those guys, you can chase them your whole life, sometimes it’s worth it to do it, and other times you just have to hope that you can overpower them and that your brand will hold stronger. Sometimes it’s easy to find the original source too. If people are looking at the same thing, they can be like, “Well, this one started in 2020 and this one started in 2025, so I know who was there first.”

Nikki Day: I will say, the difference in the products is very noticeable. You can tell it’s the same design, but our quality is much better. So it hasn’t ever been something that we’ve been overly concerned about. It’s just more frustrating rather than anything when someone takes your design that you took a year and a half to design and tries to take credit for it.

Catherine Bennett: What are you funneling your energy into to get loyal customers? How do you detract people from the dupes of the world, even with shoppers who will shop for that?

Nikki Day: I am a very firm believer in intentional branding and just knowing the value you can bring as a brand, and especially a parent brand. My prior business I spent working with an industry that was all young moms. I was surrounded by them all day, and moms talk and they want to help each other like it is a community, and people want to be a part of this community. If you bring value, they want to share it with other parents And so really early on, I just needed to be a brand that people saw value in, and that provided something that solved a problem. All of our marketing is very intentional. The design is very intentional, the name is very intentional. And I think people get really excited about that. It’s not just another brand that doesn’t have a story. You have to have a story to tell; people have to connect with you. And that’s what brings brand loyalty. Not just a good product — you can have a good product, but if you don’t have good branding, people don’t connect with it. So I think putting all your energy into branding upfront was one of the best things that we could have done, and in the long term, to protect our brand from stuff like this is just continuing to build on that value and that sense of community that people find in your brand.

Brody Day: And another avenue that we’ve been putting energy into lately is our marketing team. We have changed our marketing team several times, and what’s hard is e-commerce. We have no stores. It’s all sold online through Instagram, social media, TikTok or our website itself. And it’s important as you look for the right partners to have people that love your brand and believe in it, but make sure that they also can appeal to it. Especially with the way things change with Meta, which was Facebook only at the time, they have constant recording going on. They have iOS updates that can be disruptive to marketing targeting. That’s been a rollercoaster ride in and of itself, trying to figure out how to navigate that and keep our revenue coming in, and figure out how to have a healthy row as like we’re working through all these things to make our marketing effective, to maximize our profitability, reduce customer acquisition costs, and because the technology is constantly changing. Just in the last five years, it’s incredibly hard to keep up with.

Nikki Day: We are changing on a monthly basis. AI, like everything is changing, and you have to be on top of that.

Catherine Bennett: What is bringing in the most revenue? Is it a specific platform? Is TikTok now trumping Instagram? What does that look like?

Nikki Day: No, ours is still Meta. Meta is responsible for about 80 percent of our income, so we rely pretty heavily on Meta ads, but we also run Pinterest. We find a lot of moms on Pinterest and TikTok. TikTok is interesting because it’s a little more of an impulse-buy platform. So looking at the price point, we’re a little high for TikTok. But some of our other products do much better on TikTok than they do on Meta. You kind of have to know which products perform well where, and also the percentage of ad spend on each platform is really important because they all kind of work together. Google and Meta work together. We find that there’s a certain percentage of spend that needs to be done on both to really bring the most efficient return for us.

Catherine Bennett: Before we wrap up, you guys have an impressive money mindset, and I think a lot of people don’t end up pursuing a business because it’s scary, and a lot of that fear is around maybe there’s some rejection, but it’s money. It’s, what’s going to happen to me if this doesn’t go well, and you had such a scary bankruptcy situation or potential. Because you’ve started multiple businesses now, have you always had a specific money mindset? Have you learned along the way? How has it helped you?

Nikki Day: I think we all have a certain money mindset or mentality that is shaped over the years, whether the way our parents talked about money, or the way we grew up. There’s a lot of things that influence us when we think about our relationship with money. I actually did a lot of work in this space prior to starting a business, just learning about different money mindsets and healthier ways to view money. And I feel like it’s been easy for me to adapt to that. You can think of money as this place of scarcity, there’s never enough, and your risk aversion is really low. Or, you can think of money as, there’s always enough, and your risk tolerance is too high. For me, the best way to think about money has just been that money is a tool, and there’s no emotional connection. It’s nothing more, nothing less. It’s a tool for me to pursue my dreams. And I think that made it a lot easier when we experienced that loss, because I remember when they called me and told me, and I just kind of responded, and I was like, “Okay, what do we do moving forward?” And then he got off the phone and called Brody and he’s like, “I can’t believe how calm your wife was.” I didn’t know if something was wrong, but for me, I was just like, “okay, you know, how do we move forward?’ I didn’t have this huge emotional connection to money. So I think that’s something really important too, before you start a business, before any type of risk that you’re willing to take, is really understanding how you connect with money and trying to find a really healthy way to think about because running a business is difficult, and I see why the majority of businesses fail in the first five years because it is really hard. And if you are emotionally connected to risk and money, you’ll give up. You’ll give up; you won’t last.

Brody Day: It’ll influence your decisions heavily. Something that’s really important about starting a business, and just business in general: Everything costs more than you thought it would. It’s like building a house or doing a remodel — everything costs more. So if you’re budgeting, if you’re saving or planning ahead, it’s important to make sure you don’t get in over your skis, because of all the stressors that happen in business once you’re going under. We’ve never had it, but that’s got to be a horrible feeling. Just knowing I can’t keep up with this, it’s going to bury me; that’s just gut-wrenching. So I’d encourage people to obviously learn and develop a healthy money mindset, but know that starting a business is taxing and it’s capital-intensive. We talk about this all the time. Even when we were starting, we were talking about, “holy cow, we have to fork out more money. Oh my gosh. DFM, that’s going to cost more money than the tooling.” We didn’t even think about that, and being able to continue to fund it, we got lucky. That’s another big reason why businesses fail is they run out of money to be able to continue to keep putting it in.

Nikki Day: I think too, a part of that is once you do start to scale and have started a business, don’t get too caught up on scaling too fast. Scale responsibly and effectively, because a profitability problem is a lot easier to solve early on than it is five years down the road. If I could say one thing, it’s to focus on profitability as early as you can, and worry less about scaling and growth. Grow responsibly, and I think that is a big reason why businesses can’t keep up after a few years.

Brody Day: It’s Tom Cruise in the new “Maverick” movie at the beginning, when he gets in that really fast ship, and he’s flying, and he reaches the goal, and then he looks down and it’s Maverick, so he’s like, “Yeah, I’m gonna go a little further.” But in the movie, he lived, so do it responsibly. It’s great advice.

Catherine Bennett: I almost feel like we should end on that note, because I was about to ask what’s to be the best advice you would give to, especially those who are investing heavily themselves in their business or their product? I think you just answered that question.

Nikki Day: I have one more piece of advice for that. Whenever I go into a business, I have an exit plan. I go into a business knowing my end goal, whether that’s to sell, when I want to sell, or whether it’s a business that you want to pass on to your family. Knowing the why and your plan really helps in those moments when things get hard and when you’re like, “I’m not sure if I want to put more money into this or where we’re going.” I think just knowing your end game is really important when you’re owning a business. So I would say keeping that focus on that will help you drive your decisions within your business at all times.