# Dr. Squatch: From $1.5K Soap to $1.5B Unilever Acquisition

**Podcast:** How I Built This with Guy Raz
**Published:** 2026-11-09

## Transcript

I bought maybe four or five hundred bars of soap to start with.
Literally had it on a shelf in my closet.
My mom took over the shipping department.
She did it out of my old childhood bedroom, which is pretty cool.
There was a point where my dad called me and was like, hey, you need to find a fulfillment center so I can have my wife back.
Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.
I'm Guy Raz and on the show today, How a burned out consultant, a trip to the farmer's market, and a viral ad combined to turn a natural soap side hustle into a $1.5 billion brand.
Dr.
Squatch.
If you were super online back in 2018, you might have come across this really crazy ad.
Listen up.
The soap you shower with, it's s***.
You probably haven't even questioned what bar of soap you lather up with.
Let's face it.
Most guys don't.
They're still using whatever bar their mommy bought for her little man.
This video features a big bearded dude standing in an outdoor shower being told he needs better soap.
You won't just smell good either.
Your skin will be healthier and more nourished.
Dare I say, soft.
This ad helped turn a tiny business into a major brand selling millions of bars of soap every month.
And as you're about to hear...
Dr.
Squatch launched with just $1,500.
And in 2025, Unilever acquired it in a deal reportedly worth $1.5 billion.
So do the math on that one.
That is a 1 million X return on the original investment.
The guy behind the company is Jack Haldrop, who got the idea after buying a bar of soap at a farmer's market to help with his psoriasis.
Building that business would mean putting most of his savings on the line.
and straining a lifelong friendship.
And eventually, Jack would have to ask himself whether he still wanted to run the company he created.
Jack grew up in a middle-class family in Carmel, Indiana.
His mom worked nights as a respiratory therapist so she could be home for breakfast and dinner.
His dad worked in restaurants before starting a company that connected local businesses to the Internet.
Jack studied business at Indiana University, and when he graduated, he took a job as a consultant at a big firm in Chicago.
I didn't like being a consultant, and a lot of consulting is kind of positioning yourself as an expert and telling other people what to do, even though you're not necessarily in their business.
And so I maybe had like a little bit of imposter syndrome from that, and I also just had a desire to, you know, I would say get into the arena or like...
be involved in actually building something versus kind of critiquing from a consultant lens.
And I say the second epiphany was really this realization that I didn't want to necessarily be anybody that was a partner at my firm.
So the highest level that you can get at this type of company is to become a partner.
And there's a lot of great stuff about it.
You make pretty good money, but you're still kind of in that travel lifestyle.
And they actually traveled.
more because they would go almost like day to day from job to job to just check in because they're kind of the main person.
So you're traveling actually four or five days a week to different places, not just one place.
And I just felt that the lifestyle and kind of the health and the quality of life that these people had, it wasn't great and it wasn't what I wanted.
And the decent money was not like near enough to kind of make up for that.
And so I had this realization that...
If I don't want to be that person, then why am I, you know, the longer I stay in this career, the more kind of trapped I'm going to be.
Okay.
So you are, this is going through your head, but it's still a job and you're, you come from a family that I think is, you know, expects you to be responsible and make rational decisions.
So like, I imagine you're not just going to like walk in the door one day and be like, I quit.
I'm out of here.
Like, what's going to happen that way?
Yeah, I would never allow that, I guess, for myself.
I started to have this idea that I wanted to become an entrepreneur or that I wanted to move into the tech industry and work for a small startup.
And I wasn't really sure where to start or what to do.
But I knew that if I did something, I wasn't going to leave my job.
And so I started to just basically become obsessed with...
learning everything I could about entrepreneurship in terms of just like absorbing content.
And one of the benefits of the travel-based job is you have so much downtime by yourself and very few distractions when you're on the road or even if you're at a local client because you're driving.
And so I had ample time to kind of just think and to listen to podcasts and read books.
And so my first step was just to put myself into that world of consuming as much as I could around those topics.
And what kind of things were you reading?
Do you remember?
Four Hour Workweek was a classic that stands out.
Lean Startup.
Eric Reese's book, yeah.
Lean Startup, Eric Reese's book, yeah.
Yeah.
Okay, so you are, and tell me about your own lifestyle at the time.
I mean, you're in your mid-20s.
Did you have time to like take care of yourself, exercise, or are you just on the road all the time and eating fast food?
Yeah, it wasn't great.
It's very hard to be healthy on the road because it's such a grind that one of the main benefits that you get is the ability to just go to all the restaurants in town that you're at and on the client's dime.
And so you're typically going out to all these places.
And as much as you want to stay disciplined, it's just very hard to pass up certain meals.
And even if you try to stay healthy in a restaurant environment, it's just tough.
And so, yeah, I mean, I had a great kind of social life.
I had a lot of friends in Chicago.
I lived with friends that mostly were from IU and just people I knew from the area.
But I'd say from a work standpoint, I wasn't too happy with my lifestyle.
And then I did have a health condition kind of pop up basically around this same timeframe around 2012 as well, which probably contributed to a shift in some of my views.
What was the, do you mind talking about the condition?
Yeah, no, it's, um, so it's psoriasis and it's basically kind of, kind of like a rash on your skin and it started very small.
Um, but I started to notice it and then kind of research it.
And I think it shifted my perspective in a couple of ways.
I mean, one, just being, being in my twenties, that was maybe my first sense of like not being invincible.
And it was like, oh my gosh, like, you know, what's wrong with me?
And I was very, just very resistant to like, I don't know, mainstream medical treatment for whatever way, for whatever reason.
And I became very interested.
Like, I think that one of the first books I read was Primal Blueprint.
And so I changed my diet to the extent that I could and started to kind of get into understanding like a little bit more about health and like natural foods and personal care products.
And so, you know, that was a big shift.
So walk me through how you start to think about.
you know, what you would eventually start to work on.
Yeah.
So like I said, I knew I didn't want to quit my job.
I probably had, you know, maybe 10,000 in savings.
So I knew that I kind of, that was my startup capital.
And so I would say that kind of like along this psoriasis journey, I started shopping at farmer's markets here and there.
And eventually I discovered or I bought some soap at a farmer's market.
And took a home, took a shower and just like loved the product.
And it was kind of this, like one of those experiences in your life that stands out for, might be like more impactful than, than you would think.
And so normally I always use body wash when I showered, you know, especially like in the Chicago winter, like my skin would just feel really dry, really tight, kind of cracky after doing that.
And using this soap, like I didn't have that feeling like my soap, my skin felt soft, felt kind of moisturized.
And It was just some random farmer's market stand.
Somebody was selling handmade soap.
Yeah, I was buying produce and meat, and then there was a seller of the soap, and so I just figured I'd try it out.
It was totally random.
But yeah, it kind of actually made me look forward to showering, where I think before that, it was always something that I felt like I had to do out of necessity, because obviously I had to stay clean, but I would always get these like...
negative effects after showering that I didn't like.
And so, you know, that just stood out to me and caused me to research a little bit more about the product.
And as I started to research it, like there was this story around it that became very interesting to me.
What was the story?
So basically, you know, what I had purchased was called cold process soap.
And it's a way of making soap that's been around forever.
And it became...
I'd say, depopularized in the early 1900s because it's hard to do at scale.
And also, it's kind of more expensive than the bar soap that's normally in the store now.
And so because of these kind of production reasons that became, I guess, less popular, it's just kind of not in the mainstream, even though it's been around forever.
And so...
I just thought that was really interesting.
And the fact that it was, it wasn't just like, oh, there's one or two ingredients that are different.
But the fact that it's like, it's actually fundamentally a different process and fundamentally a different product than what's on the shelf in the store.
That just kind of really stood out to me.
All right.
So soap that you buy in the stores made, I guess, I don't know what it's called, but it's a cold process.
I'm assuming is that it's cold.
It's not heated up.
Is that right?
Yeah.
So When you make soap, you do actually kind of like when you mix lye and water, it gets pretty hot and then you actually will heat up the oils a little bit.
So you are adding some heat.
But the main soap that you would find at a store is called extrusion type soap.
And it's through kind of a much higher heat process through kind of like a manufacturing at scale that you would see with other products like molds and things of that nature.
And so I think in the bar soap space, the category had been kind of commoditized and with like very cheap products that weren't great.
And that's kind of what was that on the shelf at the time.
So I guess you could say like commercial soap is like ultra high pasteurized, ultra high temperature pasteurized milk versus like maybe flash pasteurization or even unpasteurized milk, right?
Which a lot, you know, I know.
I'm going to get letters from people like, don't drink that.
But a lot of people do.
I've had it.
It's fantastic.
There's a different taste, right?
And there's more bacteria, good bacteria in things that are less pasteurized.
So, I mean, it's kind of, let's kind of, is that a fair analogy a little bit?
I think, yeah, I think there's definitely some similarities in that analogy.
I think it's kind of just less processed overall and ends up with a higher quality kind of ingredient.
Right.
And so probably the guy you were buying it from made it, right?
Yeah.
And you're, okay, so you're, you like the soap, but you're, how do you start to think, I mean, when you start to research this, right, and you realize that this is very hard to make at scale, I mean, for a lot of people that would be, you sort of move on and say, okay, this is, maybe this isn't the right product to focus on because I can't hand make soap and turn this into a business.
Or maybe you can, but a small business.
What got you thinking, oh, this is something I want to maybe pursue?
I think it was like that story of the soap being different and the idea that I could build a brand to tell that story.
And what I really thought was possible was, you know, I would say the average guy, most of my friends, 20-year-olds living in Chicago, were not shopping at farmer's markets and they were not buying cold process artisan soap.
And what I thought was that I could basically use the internet and this thing called e-commerce to reach those people and sell them this product that they wouldn't normally discover.
And so that's what excited me.
And whether it's through kind of naivety or maybe it's just the lean startup mindset, I wasn't thinking about, can this be a multi-million dollar business or anything like that?
I was mainly thinking...
hey, I love this product.
There's probably other people like me that wouldn't normally find the product, this product, and maybe I can introduce them to it.
But there's a slight issue, which is you got to make the soap.
You got to learn how to make soap, right?
I'm assuming that you started to find resources, maybe online or in books, to teach you how to do that cold process yourself.
Yeah, soap making is very easy, especially like in a small batch.
scale or setting.
And so it's something you can do in your kitchen.
Yeah, what is it?
It's like lye and water.
And then, you know, a handful of oils that you can choose, whether it's olive oil, coconut, palm type of oils is the base of a soap and then any kind of scents or other additives that you may add to it.
So essentially, you can mix that together with kitchen equipment and you have to handle lye.
carefully.
But other than that, it's, you know, it's a fairly easy process.
And so I think, so I did make some batches and that was fun.
But I think pretty quickly, you know, again, like my perspective was like, Hey, I want to take this product to another market.
Not that I want to fundamentally change this product.
And so I didn't set out with the goal of like, I have to recreate and make the best cold process soap of all time.
My mindset was more, I have to introduce this into a customer that's going to love it, that doesn't know it yet.
Okay, but you're still working at this firm, right?
But you're at nights and sort of on weekends, just kind of coming up with a concept, but really not...
not worrying too much about the actual soap.
Like you, you figured that was actually going to be relatively easy.
Like making a quality bar of soap was going to be easy.
The challenge was going to be figuring out how to build a brand.
Correct.
Yeah.
Especially at a small scale.
And so obviously my approach was to tailor kind of soaps that already exist into like what guys would like.
So like a.
Pine tar was a huge seller for us.
It was like a black soap.
It had a square.
We chose a square shape to differentiate from that perspective.
There was a few little decisions like that, but again, wasn't trying to recreate that from the ground up.
Eventually, it just kind of all clicked, and I gave myself a 90-day goal to launch the business.
I found a manufacturer.
Yeah, that means a manufacturer.
Tell me what else you had to do in 90 days.
Yeah, found a manufacturer.
This was pre Shopify days.
So I actually like bought a website template and then had to modify, you know, the HTML code and put in pictures and things like that of the soap and basically maybe did a couple like legal things.
So that was probably about $1,500 all in and like a 90 day sprint once I had made the decision to bring it to life.
And you called it, what'd you call it?
Sasquatch Soap.
Okay.
And tell me about that name.
Why'd you call it that?
So my sister is very creative.
She's a little more of a musician, but she still was good with drawing.
And I told her about this concept of a soap company that I wanted to create for guys.
And I wanted this brand that was, you know, kind of manly, but funny, whimsical, outdoorsy.
And so I was like, can you help me come up with a character for it?
And so she drew the Sasquatch character and I was like, oh my God, this is perfect.
And so, you know, that was prior to a name, but the character, I fell in love with it, kind of like took it from there, was able to color it and add some stuff.
And then, yeah, just kind of ran with the name Sasquatch, I think.
There's a funny thing with the brand where we wanted to almost stay away from Bigfoot references because it felt too over the top, too aggressive.
And Sasquatch was just kind of a different way of positioning it, but with the same kind of character.
And so that's kind of how that all ended up.
Okay, so you gave yourself 90 days to get a website going, file an LLC as an LLC, and have product made and sell.
And the idea would be...
to sell exclusively through a website.
You were not going to go to farmer's markets and set up tables.
Correct.
Okay, so let's break this down.
How did you find somebody to make it for you?
That's pretty easy.
I mean, so making, again, it's not complicated.
So I found somebody in the Chicago area, met with them, and kind of, again, we kind of agreed on some small changes and some things to do in terms of sense that would appeal to guys.
And probably had, you know, four to five SKUs to launch with.
And I bought maybe four or five hundred bars of soap maybe to start with.
And, you know, literally had it on a shelf in my closet in my room in Chicago that I was using as my fulfillment.
And how much did a bar of soap cost you?
$1.50.
And you were going to sell them for like five, six bucks?
Yeah, six bucks.
Okay, so now before we get to the actual launch.
Tell me about this sort of six-month period of lots going on because you're going to launch this thing online.
It's going to be a tiny little, you know, it's going to be one of millions of websites, but you're going to launch it.
And you also are going to pursue a different job opportunity.
Yeah, I launched it first.
And, you know, the first six months, it went well enough to want to continue.
and gave me enough confidence that the e-commerce space was the space that I wanted to pursue.
And so I chose to pursue a job in New York through somebody I knew that did software development for an e-commerce platform that was kind of a pre-Shopify platform.
And how long were you in New York?
About six months.
Okay.
And did you leave the company at the end of that six-month period?
I started working remote for probably another six months after that.
But New York was just not for me.
It was kind of not a great place to be when you're trying to launch your own business and work for another startup.
I was probably making $25 an hour.
You know, it just was like, if my goal was to kind of build up my savings and use that as a way to fund my business, it was just probably one of the worst places I could be.
And so you decide to move to, I believe, San Francisco.
Yeah, I had a little stopover in Colorado kind of for the ski season just to enjoy the lifestyle of that.
But eventually, yeah, landed in San Francisco mainly because my sister was living there and had a very cheap room open up in the house that she was living in.
Got right.
Because it's not also not a cheap place to live.
Correct.
Right.
Okay.
So you moved to San Francisco because your sister's there.
You maybe can save some money.
I live in the Bay Area.
I love San Francisco.
It's a great city.
A lot happening there in 2013.
But let's go back to the e-commerce site that you launched six months before that.
When you say it was doing well, how well?
How much money could it have been generating?
I mean, this is you, a website, and bars of soap, very limited budget to buy ads.
How much do you remember making in your first six months?
or maybe the first year?
The first year, which was like, let's call it like September to the end of the year, I made about $12,000 in sales.
Okay.
And so I thought that was awesome, to be honest.
And how did you reach people?
Where did the sales come from?
A lot of it was general word of mouth and kind of posting on Facebook and convincing friends and family to buy.
And then...
I had a small kind of budget for Google AdWords set up and was starting to learn that and explore that.
But help me understand the business.
Were you doing all the fulfillment?
Like when you moved to San Francisco, did you move to San Francisco with suitcases full of soap and keep it in your apartment and send it out yourself?
So when I lived in Chicago, I was doing all the fulfillment.
And I would come home from working on the road, come home Thursday, Friday, ship out a batch of orders.
Maybe we had 10 orders that week.
And so it was kind of like at that volume.
And so that was easy enough to handle.
Once I was leaving, I did have a call with my mom and my parents.
And I was expressing concern on how to continue it from that perspective.
And my mom offered to take over and be the shipping department.
And so that was amazing.
She did it out of, out of my old childhood bedroom, which is pretty cool.
And so we had the soap and then she was actually curating, like we used to do these gift boxes that were, she would go get old cigar boxes from cigar stores locally and, you know, try to haggle them down to like a dollar a box.
And then we would kind of put soaps in there and wrap them up.
And that was like our gift box product, which was a pretty big product at the time.
So, so yeah, at that time, my mom, took over the shipping and kind of the gift box portion of the business in exchange for some equity.
So it was a pretty cool deal.
How long did you continue to work with that Chicago manufacturer?
Like, did you, well into 2013, were they still making your soap?
For a few years, yeah.
Okay.
And let's talk about 2013.
You know, again, so you're running this remotely, which you can.
You read the four-hour work week.
You knew you could do that.
And all of the inventory is being shipped to your mom, to your childhood home, and your bedroom is your warehouse.
Your mom's doing the fulfillment, which is probably manageable because, again, you probably – I mean by the end of 2013, do you remember roughly how much you guys did in sales?
2013, we did 80K roughly in sales.
Wow.
That's pretty great.
So what?
Like five?
plus orders a day or something like that roughly?
Yeah, probably.
It definitely spiked in the holidays.
And, you know, because of the gift box thing, there was a point where my dad called me and was like, hey, you need to find a fulfillment center so I can have my wife back.
And luckily at that point, we had built enough scale where when I went to go talk to fulfillment centers, you know, they were actually interested in working with us.
Okay.
So you are, It's the middle of 2013, or I guess sometime in 2013, you brought on a friend of yours, a childhood friend, to help you run the business.
I guess he also went to IU.
You went there together.
This is AJ Fountain.
And AJ moved to San Francisco?
He kind of was very nomadic.
He kind of lived part-time between San Francisco and Colorado.
But he initially started working with me.
probably in 2013.
And basically as a door-to-door soap salesman, he was doing kayak guiding in the Pacific Northwest.
And basically I said, Hey, you know, every bar you sell, I'll give you a dollar.
And so, you know, it was like basically a dollar for the business, a dollar for him.
And so I would ship him out, you know, batches of soap and he would kind of go door-to-door and sell it.
And so – all right.
So he eventually – so eventually, I mean he's doing some sales for you, but eventually it's more formalized, right?
Like he actually – I guess he's named president, which was just the two of you.
So that means that you both did everything.
But was he – did he also – both of you I think were business students, right, at IU?
Yeah.
I'm not sure exactly what his degree was, but yeah, he – Got some money raised up from his family and bought into the business and got an ownership stake and we became business partners.
All right.
So you are – I mean a lot of what you were doing from what I understand, those first sort of full two years was a lot of trying to get this into small retailers, like local boutiques.
I read that you guys like – would go all up and down the West Coast, right?
Would you do that together?
Did you go into stores as well?
We did do that a few times.
And you would, what was the pitch you would make?
I mean, we would kind of come in and talk to them about we have this handmade, you know, natural soap for guys.
And I think half the people bought from us because they would say something like, oh, you remind me of my son or you remind me of somebody I know.
And it's, isn't it so cute what you're doing?
I think there was more of that than there was.
you know, this is an amazing idea.
So, all right.
And meantime, you get a chance to be in one of these boxes, right?
I think you were actually in Birchbox, but you were also in this one called Bespoke Post.
And did they discover you just like serendipitously or did you kind of pitch them?
Bespoke Post found us very randomly, I think through Google search.
Birchbox, I had a personal connection through like friend of a friend to just so happen to know the men's buyer at Birchbox.
So that was an amazing connection.
But those were in 2013, kind of into 2014.
That was probably our biggest like marketing channel that was like somewhat scalable were those boxes.
And were those boxes helpful?
I mean, I imagine in some ways.
you know, it's risky because you probably aren't making that much money off of it.
You are getting exposure with the hope that people will order your product, but it's a little bit like Groupon.
Like a lot of businesses were like, sure, you know, we'll do two for one massages, but then people just took the Groupon but never came back.
So they were amazing at the start.
And then I think those businesses got a lot smarter.
So the V1 of working with those boxes was they would pay us.
essentially at cost or maybe slightly above cost of our product.
So for, for our standpoint, it's like we're getting free marketing and then if we can get, and they were very oriented around trying to get people to then buy the products that they sampled.
So they helped facilitate that.
So if we would get, you know, if we would send 4,000 out on bespoke posts, we might get 10% to buy from us.
So that was, you know, that was huge.
And it was free, you know, it's free essentially.
And then it quickly moved to like, you know, from we're getting paid for the product to now we're giving the product to them for free, which still, okay, that makes sense.
It's free marketing, still, still valuable to then it turned into, you know, pay a fee to be included because the marketing is so valuable.
And then they kind of closed off some of their sales channels so that like, instead of us getting this sale, then they would like buy some from us wholesale and then they would sell it on their own store.
So over time, and I obviously understand why they did those things, but over time, from the brand standpoint, the business, the channel kind of degraded into something that, you know, wasn't as valuable.
Yeah, I mean, I mean, I'm sure initially it was great.
They're buying your product and they were facilitating the sales, but they realized that wasn't a good business model for them.
because they needed subscribers.
Plus, if they could get the products for free and say, hey, we're just another platform to market your products, that's even better.
And then if it came to like, oh, you got to pay us, that's like slotting fees at a supermarket.
So that's like, great.
That's three different channels of revenue.
Yeah, and it was still good.
It just kind of went from a way to really get profitable customer acquisition to a way to kind of still get some good brand marketing.
But it stopped being like a very high level, you know, conversion channel for us.
What was the point at which you felt comfortable stop like no longer doing other work like consulting work or IT work or, you know?
Yeah.
So my hand was actually a little bit forced in that.
And the company I was working for went under towards kind of the second half of 2014.
And, you know, one of the like benefits that came from that was just a cutting of the ties that was that forced me to go 100% all in on the company.
And during that same time, one of the biggest benefits I got from living in San Francisco was that I chose to attend this thing called General Assembly and do a digital marketing class through them.
And I want to say I put like, I maybe had $5,000 left in my savings and I put $3,500 of that towards this class.
So it was a big gamble.
And I kind of, at the same time, I was actually like preparing my resume and kind of putting together like a website of like, you know, consulting for Google Analytics and stuff like that.
But the class ended up being...
one of those just incredible experiences that turned into an inflection point for us.
And it was taught by somebody who was directly in the industry doing media buying and ads for this clothing brand called Beta Brand.
And the biggest thing that I discovered there was basically that we should be doing Facebook ads and not Google ads.
And so again, 2014, it's very early days for Facebook ads, especially for small brands.
A lot of their tools had just been kind of launched that year.
And I got to see firsthand, you know, from this instructor, like what he was doing in his companies.
And that was, you know, almost an immediate like 3X in revenue in the month after kind of learning and bringing that to the company.
All right, let's...
First of all, General Assembly, I think, is still around.
It's like a training program.
Like you could pay to take classes there, right?
Like a training program.
And it probably wasn't very expensive.
And this was a marketing class that you took.
You had been doing Google AdWords.
And through this class, you realize that Facebook actually is where you need to be.
First of all, why did you come to that realization?
What was the problem with Google Ads versus Facebook?
Yeah, ultimately, nobody.
was searching Google for men's soap or natural soap or any of the keywords that we could potentially rank for.
It was a couple hundred people per month.
So there was one point in the business where I thought, okay, if we can just own natural soap for men as the search term, we have made it at that point.
And then we got there and I was like, okay, we're getting five sales a month from that.
But what we discovered through Facebook ads was basically that we were an impulse byproduct.
And so nobody was actively looking on the internet to buy natural soap or very few people were.
But if it came across their feed in a way that was kind of interesting and entertaining, then they would be like, oh, okay, I'll try this out.
And so Facebook basically opened up that type of marketing to us.
Okay, I want to get back to Facebook in a sec, right?
Because that's where you would start to run experiments.
But meantime, you've got this.
other challenge or this this i should say a challenge which is um the name of your brand sasquatch soap you get i guess a cease and desist letter am i right about that from somebody saying hey that's our that's our brand yes tell me what happened basically what had happened was that there was another company selling, let's say, a variety of soaps, maybe 30, 50 soaps.
And one of the ones that they sold was called Sasquatch Soap.
And so even though they had a different company name, obviously based on being in that space, they had rights to use that trademark.
And we actually only found out because of a third party that tried to trademark it because nobody had a trademark.
So they had a common law thing on it.
And so this other party saw our brand.
thought it was cool, tried to trademark it before us, and then they found out that this other person had it.
So there was like, these people ended up getting into a battle behind the scenes, and we could kind of see that that was happening.
And so we knew that we had to pivot.
And yeah, it felt like an existential crisis at the time.
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So you have this name, you've got a website, you've got customers, and, I mean...
That is stressful.
You kind of like you can't use that name anymore.
And you've established you've spent two years, two plus years building up this name and this business, even though it's still small.
I think you were already in boxes under the name Sasquatch Soap.
Right.
So tell me a little bit about just that, that, you know, what was going through your head trying to untangle this?
I mean, were you thinking that's it?
We're toast.
We're done.
Yeah, it felt potentially existential and in large part because for the longest time, we could not think of like an alternative brand name.
And we had these terrible names like Kingsley's, Sudsworth's, and we were, you know, serving customers and serving friends and basically every name that we had thrown out there, everybody thought was terrible.
And so, yeah, there was a lot of fear.
There was a lot of stress.
But at the same time, I mean, we didn't have a whole lot of time to react and to think about it.
And you had to come up with a brand new website.
I mean, a brand new URL, right?
I mean, you had.
Correct.
You would have to.
So you're thinking of completely different names.
So how did you come upon the name Dr.
Squatch?
I mean, it's Sasquatch soap that you couldn't use.
Yeah.
So you changed it, which is an interesting change.
How did you.
come up with that?
And then also, wasn't that going to be risky?
Yes.
I think a couple of things.
One is that we wanted to, I think, make it more of a character.
So Sasquatch Soap versus Dr.
Squatch.
Dr.
Squatch became like more of a figure and we wanted to do that.
And we thought that the doctor kind of gave it a little bit of an elevated positioning.
And we ultimately weren't sure if it was going to work.
So we had kind of a dual track of like, hey, maybe this name is too close.
Maybe it's not.
And if it wasn't, if it ended up failing, like we would have had a backup plan, which was, again, like none of the names we were felt great about, but we would have had to do something.
But we went forward with the Dr.
Squatch name, went through, you know, the trademark process, put it out there, didn't have any.
I think there's a period for people to comment or to flag against it, and we passed that period, and so it worked out.
And the character now, I mean, it's a Sasquatch with a pipe.
That's basically what your sister had drawn initially?
Correct.
And so had you called that character?
Did you have a name for that character?
I mean, he's probably known as Dr.
Squatch now, but did you think about that character?
with a name or is it with a particular kind of personality?
Well, I think it just evolved over time.
And I think that after the rebranding, I mean, I think we quickly realized that it was actually a better name.
And so it turned from an existential crisis into like one of those.
things that was a huge benefit that maybe we would have never done if this didn't happen and it would have been a worse name and turned out differently.
So I think we recognized that early on and I think it did allow us to lean more into the persona of the character than we had done previously.
Okay.
So let's kind of dive into Facebook.
So you know that Facebook is probably a better place for you to start spending money.
But did you have, I mean, did you have money, I guess?
I guess it wasn't that, I mean, it's different today, right?
Facebook in 2014, I've heard people say it's like, it was like shooting fish in a barrel.
Like, you know, it was just, it was a different, the platform's totally different.
So like how much would a Facebook ad cost you to, you know, roughly?
Yeah, it was, I mean, it was so different.
One of our first ads that I remember.
I used to use these free library images.
And then I found one that had a little funny little Sasquatch character in the woods.
It was like a toy figurine.
And I literally just put a bar of soap photoshopped next to it.
And then I put an ad that said, you know, soap for men.
And I think I ran that for six months.
And it was like our best ad.
And we were getting customers for like 15 bucks on it.
Wow.
And that was it.
That was the ad.
Yeah.
It was like just a little wonky.
just a static ad on Facebook, so for men, and that would drive traffic.
Yeah.
And so I would say I wasn't the most sophisticated at that time.
I think I quickly realized that the way to grow the business was going to be Facebook ads.
And so I dedicated kind of myself to becoming an expert at that.
But yeah, the early days, you didn't necessarily know all the numbers, but ultimately we were able to get customers for, I would say like, probably like a break even after the first order, which is pretty good.
So, all right.
So you get through the name change, you start to focus on Facebook ads.
And I think around this time, it's 2015, let's say, I think you moved to San Diego.
Is that right?
A year later, but yes.
Do you remember what you did in sales that year?
Yeah, about 750K.
Wow.
That's a huge leap.
Yeah.
So you were probably making close to what you were making.
as a consultant, I guess, by that point.
This 2015 was probably the first year I crossed that threshold.
Yes.
And by the end of 2016, the business had done 1.8 million in sales.
So we had another strong jump.
That's amazing.
And this is all through face, mainly through Facebook ads.
Yes.
I mean, that's an, that's amazing, right?
$1.8 million in that year.
And that class you took really paid off.
I mean, it really.
taught you a lot of things.
It wasn't just Facebook ads.
There were other things you were probably doing.
You were looking at data analytics.
You were making decisions based on that data.
Can you kind of walk me through a little bit about what you were doing and how you were shifting and making decisions based on what information you were getting?
Yeah, I would say in 2016, my main role in the company was really focus on understanding e-commerce.
And that was the first time that I think it started to really come together.
So Facebook ads was just one part of it.
It's obviously how you get the attention and kind of get the initial customers.
But I think we started to really understand more about, you know, things like subscription and merchandising, browning or merchandising.
We started to understand more about how to do email marketing and retention-based marketing so that our customers were valuable on the back end.
And I think it shows that the market we were going after was big and it didn't feel hard to hit these numbers.
It almost felt like it was just kind of happening, again, with Facebook ads as the main driver, not the only driver, but I think adding these other pieces within e-commerce and starting to understand.
the data and modeling that a little bit better.
I want to dive into 2016, because this is a pivotal year, $1.8 million in sales.
Amazing.
And also, I think this is the year when AJ and you split, you go separate ways.
He leaves.
And again, these things are challenging because there's humans and personalities and history involved, but it's very real.
It's common.
And it's It happens, you know.
I mean, what did you start to think the business could be?
And where was there a difference in sort of vision or view between you and your partner?
Yeah, so I think with all the growth that we had and some of the metrics I was seeing, I really had a big vision for where the brand could go.
And I just kind of...
felt like we were in the early innings, even if I didn't know exactly where that was going to end up.
And AJ is, he's an extremely kind of outdoor focused person.
And I think the business was at the level of achieving his dream, which was kind of to make a certain amount to live off of so that he could spend as much time as possible kind of in nature.
Like a lifestyle brand.
Basically, it could be passive income for a great life.
Exactly.
Which is, by the way, just to put a point on that, that's actually not a bad ambition.
Like lots of people have that ambition and it's, you can have an incredibly meaningful, fulfilling life, especially if it's not, if scale or, you know, or even money isn't that important.
It's, if it's, I want to be able to do the things I want that I enjoy doing and I just need this amount of money to make it happen.
Totally agree.
And I, I enjoyed like a lot of that lifestyle with AJ as well.
And so this process, I mean, this process was extremely hard.
I mean, he was one of my best friends from childhood and it, you know, it was like a relationship that was just no longer working out from my perspective and no longer serving the business and where we each wanted to go.
So you had to have hard conversations.
Yeah.
A lot of hard conversations, you know, but I think both kind of recognizing and agreeing that.
you know, we just weren't on the same path in terms of where we wanted to go and that we had done a lot of good stuff together to get to that point.
But that, you know, having a separation would be the best for both.
Did that cause you stress?
Just knowing that you had to have those conversations?
Yeah, massive, massive stress on a personal level, just to deal with that.
And also just stress on a financial level in terms of negotiating and kind of going through that.
buyout process.
Because he bought into the company.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And you've done $1.8 million in sales at that point.
So, you know, I guess, you know, you could start to think about what it might be worth.
Yeah, it was a significant amount of money for where the company was at, not necessarily from a revenue standpoint, but again, just from a cash flow and a profit standpoint, you know, in that year, we made $1.8 million, like we might have done, I don't know, let's say $100K.
give or take, in profit.
But then again, from a cash flow standpoint, you're always building inventory, you have marketing expenses, so you don't necessarily have a ton of cash lying around.
And at the same time, you still know that the business is worth something fairly meaningful.
And so we had to come up with a creative structure to basically buy them out through the continued performance of the business.
From a personal standpoint, Did you also know that that was going to be maybe the end of your personal friendship?
Yeah, I wasn't sure, I mean, where it was going to end up exactly.
I mean, I think, you know, we tried to approach it amicably, but it's like, it's an extremely hard thing to do.
And there's a lot of emotion and a lot of tension.
And each person is trying to kind of get the best deal that they can for themselves.
And so it's tough.
When you made the, when you came to terms and you agreed that you were going to buy him out, Was any part of you like, God, am I just mortgaging my future here?
Like, what if our sales were just lucky and then, you know, or like, it just dies.
And then I'm on the hook to pay all this money over the next several years.
It was a real risk.
It was, you know, it was cash up front.
It was cash monthly.
And then it was kind of like cash every year in based on how performance went for a couple of years.
And I would say it was delayed gratification for me just in the sense that I didn't get to take out anything at all at that point relatively to the size that he did.
And I wasn't sure where things were going to go.
And we probably had one of our toughest stretches in, I would say, in the six to nine months after this process for a couple of reasons.
And so that was...
It just added to the stress of dealing with this process.
What happened?
Just some things started to go wrong.
I would say we were continuing to try to scale and I think added some employees and tried to build the team up for the first time post that transition happening.
The business was doing well, but it got to a point where we were spending more and kind of had invested in too much.
And people were, we just kind of couldn't afford what we had signed up for.
What did you sign up for?
You're talking about the people, that was the cost?
Yes.
Yes.
Increasing kind of that overhead cost on people, office, things like that, to an extent that drained the profitability of the business.
And then me moving away from overseeing some things like the marketing and leading to like a decline.
performance on that and some agency partners that just weren't working out.
So just honestly, just very kind of normal ups and downs of having a small business, but just happening very kind of close proximity to this buyout, which was also financially stressing the business, put us into a pretty challenging point in 2018.
And so most of your money was going to pay them.
And meantime, you've got to figure something out.
So, I mean, I would think one of the first decisions you have to make is maybe let some people go.
Or am I wrong?
Yeah, I had to let some people go.
I did kind of a process that a lot of people I know have done where I literally printed out, you know, three months worth of bank statements and was circling every line item or crossing things out just to cut expenses as much as possible.
I had to let two people go.
Basically just kept their...
kind of customer support and social media person.
But if, you know, that felt like a step back because we had been, you know, on this trajectory growing every year, we had obviously challenges, but this felt like the first time that we were maybe in a position to kind of step back as a business.
In 2018, you would have this pivotal experience.
And before we get to what that was, I guess you were...
sort of working with a marketing agency or you had contracted a marketing agency.
And from what I understand, they had worked with like the San Diego Symphony.
So first of all, tell me about this agency that you identified to work with because it's always a risk.
You don't know whether they're going to be able to bring value to what you're doing.
Yeah, I think I knew some people that worked with them and then...
They just so happened to have an office basically next door to the office we had in San Diego.
And so it was kind of natural to meet with them.
And they're very smart at marketing.
And I think we kind of just, we tiptoed into creating small videos and small ads, mainly around like, you know, Facebook advertising, as well as like some branding stuff.
And so we just kind of started doing some work with them.
And so the first things we worked on were just more basic things.
But I think...
Eventually in 2018, I had gotten through some of the challenges that I had spoken about earlier and kind of reorganized and right-sized some of the expenses and the trajectory of the company.
And I think I was just feeling maybe more positive and more like, hey, it's a good time to try to take a swing.
And I had recently gone to a marketing event or convention and...
heard a talk by somebody that was in the company called the Harmon Brothers.
And they were basically producing these Dollar Shave Club style videos.
And so going to that event, kind of learning about that, I did talk to the Harmon Brothers.
They wanted $250K to do the video and then $250K of ad spend that they would manage to help kind of like promote the video.
And so that was a massive number for us at the time.
That would probably be a couple years of profit.
And so even though we had decent revenue, there's just no way.
Yeah, that wasn't on the table, right?
And so I think I just kind of started to noodle with it.
And as I had conversations with Raindrop, the agency in San Diego, we basically just kind of said, hey, what if we just try to recreate one of these videos?
How hard could it be, basically?
And I guess we should describe it for...
Anyone who doesn't know, you can find it.
I mean, the video you guys did has 120 million views.
And for people I've seen, this guy has got like a blonde beard and like he's a big guy and he looks friendly, but also like a guy who would be, you know, like likes the outdoors.
And you shot this video.
First of all, how much did it cost you to do to shoot this whole thing?
It was about 15K.
Wow.
Amazing.
I think it's three minutes long.
Just describe this video.
What was it?
He's in the shower, but it's outdoors, and he kind of grabs your attention and says that, you know, the soap that you're using sucks.
Listen up.
The soap you shower with?
It's s***.
You probably haven't even questioned what bar of soap you lather up with.
And then we kind of go through why our soap is better, and obviously, like, a lot of funny shots in nature and with the shower and, you know, lathering up.
I'm talking about natural, nourishing, cold-pressed, hand-cut soap for men.
Men who use their hands.
Men who build things.
Men who open the pickle jar on the first try.
It's really entertaining and engaging.
And the idea, I guess, was to just put this up on YouTube and buy some Facebook ads with this video?
Yeah, I think it's easy to call it a viral video, but we knew that it would be an ad.
And so I would say it's viral because the ad was so efficient at acquiring customers.
like cheaply and profitably that that's what drove the reality is along with like some of the sharing behind it.
Well, tell me about launching it.
Like you had originally talked to somebody who said, well, we'll make it for a quarter million and then we'll put a quarter million dollars of marketing behind it.
You spent $15,000 on producing the video.
And then what did you have to spend to actually market it to get it out there into the world?
Yeah, that's a good question because when I think about marketing, I think more incrementally.
When we put it out there, let's say we're getting people to watch two minutes of content for like half a cent on average, which is crazy cheap for that level of engagement.
We're getting people to become a customer for $3 to $4.
So at that level of profitability, because let's say I make $25 on that order, and after my margins, I'm getting, let's say, $10 per customer.
At that margin level, I would spend as much as I possibly could as long as I have the supply chain to fulfill it.
So I wouldn't even think about that as a marketing budget.
I would think of that as a sales machine.
And so I would say the video was kind of like this sales machine for probably a three to four month period of time where it was just going crazy on both Facebook and YouTube in terms of how good the advertising was against it.
before it started to slow down.
So cumulatively to date, I don't know exactly how much we've spent on that.
But I would say that we basically would spend on it to the extent that it was profitable in terms of acquiring customers.
So you put it out into the world with a little bit of ad spend.
And what did it do to sales, for sales?
Yeah, I mean, sales were crazy.
And then, like I said, also they were profitable.
So we probably spent...
you know, relatively like as much as we could on the video.
Like we probably were supply chain constrained more than anything else.
And we probably did a 5 million, a little over 5 million in sales through the end of 2018.
Wow.
So you went, I mean, so that, and how much of that 5 million in sales would you attribute to that video?
Probably 30 to 50%.
Because I think it got 12 million views in that first year.
Again, today it's got 120 million views.
Very funny video.
But it was, I mean, would you call, like, how much of a sort of a game changer would you call that for the business?
Yeah, it was massive.
Obviously, from creating that, and I'd say bigger picture, bringing the brand to life in the real way for the first time ever, and creating a roadmap for us to produce future content, and us kind of really finding our voice that worked for the brand, were second level effects that it also created.
All right.
So you, $5 million, that's great.
And you go into 2019, and I think this is the first year that you go out to raise cash, to raise some money from outside investors.
Correct.
So tell me about that.
I mean, you bootstrapped up until that point.
Tell me about, I think you raised $1.3 million.
I might be wrong.
Maybe the number's different.
But yeah, tell me about that decision.
Yeah, no, that's the correct number.
So in 2018, I think I started to see the potential for the business come to life with some of the video marketing efforts that we were doing.
And I've been through a lot of ups and downs in the past two to three years.
And I think I came to this conclusion that I didn't want to run the business by myself as a lifestyle business forever and deal with all the ups and downs.
And that I wanted to take a real swing at going for something big.
And so those factors kind of came together.
And so I was open to outside investment for the first time and was in the mindset of being receptive to it.
And so I started to do some outbound outreach as well as getting some inbound requests for that, which I had kind of always gotten throughout the years, but never really responded to.
Who were you raising money from?
Was it friends and family or was it professional investors or maybe not professional, but angel investors?
No, professional investors, Guild Capital, and they were the ones that hosted that roundtable.
And it was a network of companies that either they had invested in or wanted to invest in.
And so that was a big driver of me wanting to work with them was because I could see how the collaboration in the portfolio would work and the value add that would be.
kind of brought to the table.
And so it took a few months to kind of hash out an agreement with them.
So they were your sole investor?
Correct.
And I think the valuation was like 4.3 million.
Is that right?
5.7 post money.
So I guess it depends on how you do that.
5.7.
Okay.
So man, they made a good investment.
Yeah, it was, I mean, great deal for everybody.
Okay.
So they buy a little over 20% of the company.
And that money presumably enabled you to, first of all, you relocate to LA.
I think you moved your headquarters to LA.
And what else did that money enable you to do?
The main focus of the capital raise was to increase marketing spend and increase the employee, the talent of the company.
So money for hiring and money for advertising in a way that would allow us to scale.
much quicker than we had done previously.
So 2018, you do 5 million.
Do you remember what you did in 2019?
20, 23, 20 to 23.
Wow.
And all of this, like what percentage of this is, 100% of this is direct to consumers through your website?
Correct.
You're selling at no stores at this point.
We had a small independent retail business that...
from the origins of the AJ days and that still existed.
But it was pretty marginal, you know, no, no like formal retail.
All right.
So you're, you're $25 million in 2019.
I read at the, is this right?
I read at the end of 2020, you did close to a hundred million in sales.
Is that, is that right?
Or was my research right?
113.
That's it.
I mean, I'm just thinking going from five to 113 million in a little over two years, two years, basically.
I mean, everything is going to change.
Like you're talking about like the hiring, the scale of this.
It's like, it's like, I can't imagine that hamster wheel that you were on.
Yeah, it was the hardest two years I ever worked in the most fun two years I ever had in business at the same time.
So I think.
I think a lot of businesses, when you pitch an investor, you kind of pitch like, hey, we have our business model figured out and we just need capital to add fuel to the fire.
And I think sometimes that's true, sometimes it's not.
I think in our case, it truly was a reality.
And so we basically just started spending as much as we possibly could on Facebook advertising and bringing in as much talented people as we could over that two-year period.
There were a lot of other things we did.
We did a lot of product line expansion, which enabled us to get a higher order size, which again allowed us to kind of be able to spend more and made customers more valuable.
So there was a lot of things we were doing along the way.
But it was absolutely drinking from a fire hose.
There's probably nothing harder as a CEO than kind of like hiring.
constantly for your full team plus running your business at the same time.
It's almost like having two jobs.
So that's kind of how I felt.
I'd never felt a stronger pull to work.
You know, when I would, I would almost go to sleep dreaming about the first thing I needed to do in the next morning and would wake up like ready to jump into it.
And so.
It was just such a cool experience to be a part of.
Okay.
So now – and I think you've got the pandemic in 2020, which is great for direct-to-consumer businesses because you've got captive audiences on social media all day.
And that was the $110 million year.
And, of course, everybody was focused on staying clean because everybody was freaked out about germs.
Did you see any direct correlation between that and your sales?
Yes, for sure.
I mean, COVID was like, at first we were very scared of it and very uncertain of what was going to happen in the world, obviously, and if we were going to be able to continue.
And so we initially kind of like try to slow things down because we just weren't sure like what was going to happen.
We didn't want to like build up too much inventory.
And I think a month or two into it, we clearly saw like that was not going to be the case and that the demand was going crazy.
And yeah, we were in...
hygiene space, which was another just kind of, you know, blessing that really kind of added some tailwinds.
But you know, the company was growing at a pretty crazy trajectory, even pre COVID.
So I would say it's a little hard to kind of fully isolate that, but definitely was a big tailwind for us in an unexpected way.
So okay, so you I mean, the growth is just incredible.
I think in 2021.
A private equity group came in and purchased a minority share of the business, right?
Majority share.
Majority share.
And that, I mean, I'm sure was great for the investor, probably great for you.
You stayed on.
Did you feel, I mean, how did you feel about, I mean, you were the CEO and the founder.
I mean, when you had, you know, investors now.
owning a majority of the share of the brand, did it change how you could operate?
I mean, was there oversight?
Was there more feedback?
Was there more like, hey, you know, I think, Jack, you know, you got to do more of this or less of that?
Well, I would say a couple of things about that.
I knew I had a timeline as CEO.
Just I think every founder.
you know, kind of has that journey where they figure out how far they can take their own business themselves.
And most of us are not, you know, like a Mark Zuckerberg.
And so there was definitely even a point of this growth phase where I was like, I'm, you know, I'm just not well equipped to be the CEO of a large company.
You know, I'm love and I'm great at, I think, a lot of the things for a slightly earlier stage company.
And then once it gets to that point, it's just kind of not.
not what I'm great at and not what I want to do.
So prior to going into this sale, that was actually like a big motivator.
It was actually a big motivating factor for me to want to sell in the first place was kind of knowing that that was how I felt about it.
And then also just the pace that I was operating at was just not really sustainable in terms of the work.
Even just all the emotional burden of the previous 10 years that had gone into the business, it felt like at a certain point I was going to need a break from things.
And so I went into the decision to sell part of the company with those as some of the motivating factors, not the only ones.
Right.
That makes a lot of sense.
I mean, some founders are like, I'll never, this is my thing for life.
I want to do this forever.
I'm going to stay on as long as, you know, the board is going to keep me on.
And some founders like I scaled it to this point and I wanted to get out and do other things.
And I think both of those are great, you know, options.
It sounds like because you did step down as CEO in 2023 and you felt like and I think that's really mature decision.
You felt like I'm just I'm not the right guy to run a, you know, a big CPG brand.
at this point.
I just don't have the, maybe you have what it took, but you just didn't have the passion to do that.
Yeah, I think it was a 300 person, roughly company at that point.
And it almost had come full circle into like having a job again versus where I initially started, you know, leaving my job and having some of those desires.
But I would say, ultimately, my, when you're an entrepreneur, And you have a will to succeed versus like maybe a stress or drudgery tax against things that you don't want to do.
And when your will to succeed is really high, you can overcome those things.
But then at the end of this kind of 10 years and just given the scale that the company had got to and some of the success that I had had, I think just being honest about it, my ability and my willpower to do some of those things was just lower than was needed for me to successfully do the role at the time.
So when you left, what did you want to do?
You just wanted to kind of unplug entirely?
Mostly that.
Well, I didn't leave with, you know, like you said, some people leave and maybe they have their second business or their next business in mind already.
I didn't leave with that in mind.
I left with the need to take the weight of the business off my shoulders.
And so it was nice to gradually step into a board role and still have, you know, a level of...
connection and direction in terms of what the company was doing, but to no longer be the person where I felt like I was the primary driver.
So I would say that that, you know, was kind of just a nice release period initially.
It sounds like it.
And did you have those inevitable conversations where people were like, well, what's next?
Still do.
Does that annoy you, that question?
Or do you?
Or have you gotten used to it now?
I mean, I want to know the answer as much as everybody else does.
And I think that I'm still kind of figuring that out.
I'm still in a little bit of that transition phase.
And so I have three kids and I'm very blessed to be able to have success and to also be able to spend time with my kids when they're young and to be fully present and fully focused on that.
So I try to make that a huge priority.
Last in June 2025, Unilever acquired Dr.
Squatch from all the investors, and you are still, I think, an equity stakeholder for $1.5 billion.
So really, I imagine now you're really out of it.
I mean, you have no involvement in Dr.
Squatch.
Correct.
Yeah, I was on the board up until that sale.
And after that, you know, they don't really have that board process for a company that they acquire.
So pretty much a clean break.
started, you mentioned how when you learned about soap, the big companies were making things at scale and this kind of process, this cold process was really hard to do at scale.
Now it's owned by a company, well, and even when you were running it, was at scale.
I mean, it was mass producing bars of soap.
So, I mean, does it mean that Dr.
Squatch is now doing what it set out not to do or are you, is it still, is it able to do what it was doing at a small scale, but at a larger scale?
We built our own manufacturing facility to be able to achieve the scale that we needed.
So, you know, I would say we are producing cold process soap at scale and we had to kind of figure that out from scratch.
Obviously making a batch of soap is pretty easy, but figuring out how to produce, you know, 5 million a month is a lot tougher.
It involves like some additional engineering.
And I would say that ultimately we've kind of come full circle and we've really won in the sense that we are no longer, you know, the underdog on the outside only selling online.
And now we are on shelf, you know, and just as big as like all the other big brands out there and offering, you know, what we think is a better alternative to people.
And so when you see it on the shelf, what do you think?
I still think it's cool.
I still get pictures.
I mean, yeah, I still love seeing the displays.
I still, you know, love walking into random grocery stores and I walk in and they've got, you know, Squatch stocked.
So I think it's awesome.
It used to be, you know, 90, 100% direct to consumer.
I think now the vast majority of its sales come from, you know, Target and Walmart and, you know, grocery stores.
Yeah, it's a majority retail.
The e-com business is still significant, but.
over the last three years.
And that was another reason for me to maybe not be CEO.
I mean, when we sold to Summit in 2021, we had essentially zero in retail.
And now that business alone is well over 300 million.
And so that was a little bit unforeseen for us to kind of like how quickly that would happen.
So when you think about The journey you took and where it started, like reading the four-hour work week and going to farmer's markets and sort of coming to this realization that you could build a brand around this cold process soap, which you did.
And you became very wealthy and this brand became very successful.
How much of this do you attribute to luck and timing?
I mean, Facebook ads at the time, it was just amazing and direct marketing and sort of that wave.
And how much do you think had to do with just the grind and the discipline that you put into it?
Yeah, it's close to 50-50.
I think if I like put it out on a scale, you know, I think on the...
On the kind of the grind side, I would say the number one thing is just getting started and creating a vehicle because if you don't have that, you can't benefit from any of these lucky events.
Number two is that you have to survive.
And that involves kind of just knowing when your business is in survival mode and doing a lot of things that probably many people aren't going to want to do.
And then I think that there's a third pillar around execution where that absolutely makes a difference in terms of like how far you go.
So those I would put on the side of the scale towards, you know, skill.
And then I would say on the luck side, you know, there's absolutely timing.
I don't think Squatch could have existed 10 years, you know, 10 years earlier.
I wouldn't have been able to build it.
Brick and mortar retail would not have taken it in without a proof of concept online.
And so.
It basically would have been impossible to do that.
I think that there's category around luck.
And I think that I chose to go into soap because it was very personal.
It wasn't a top-down decision where I said, hey, this is a great market to go into.
And so I think I could have done all the same things and applied that to a different product and maybe not have nearly as big of an outcome.
And it just so happens that I was kind of lucky.
that this was a recurring product and that this was a category ready to explode.
And so that probably had a big impact on how big it all got.
And then there's just the other serendipitous kind of moments and many things that led to one another meeting different people that all kind of add up.
So I think it all kind of adds up close to being 50-50, and that's how I'd break it down.
Jack, thank you.
Thanks, Guy.
That's Jack Haldrop, founder of Dr.
Squatch.
These days, Jack's still based in San Diego, raising his young kids, investing in businesses, and advising other entrepreneurs.
In fact, he also serves on the board of a company called Brick, which makes a device that helps people spend less time on their phones.
And thanks so much for listening to the show this week.
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I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.