For a company to pivot and shift its focus takes a lot of confidence and risk. But that is what being an entrepreneur means. It’s all about taking risks in action. This is what Kelly Perkins did with her company, Spinster Sisters Co. Join your host Elliot Begoun as he talks to Kelly Perkins about her shifted focus into plant-based skincare. Learn how to differentiate yourself in a very competitive market, such as the skincare industry. Learn how to raise capital as an entrepreneur, especially in these trying times. And find out some tips from Kelly herself on how to build a well-respected company.
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Listen to the podcast here
Why Businesses Need To Pivot And Differentiate From The Competition With Kelly Perkins
I have one of the founders in our community to talk about her entrepreneurial journey and continued dogged pursuit of trying to find space and differentiation in the category. Also, to talk a little bit about self-manufacturing and bootstrapping. Going from bootstrapping to making the tough decision to raise outside capital and all of those things. This is a brand that’s known for being a bit bad-ass and this is a founder that is also appropriately bad-ass. I’m excited to have her join. Kelly Perkins with Spinster Sisters. Kelly, if you would, for those reading, tell people about you and Spinster Sisters and the journey that you’ve been on.
When I started Spinster Sisters, I was a business analyst by day. I had started making soap in the ‘90s as a hobby and start using clean products for myself, my family and friends. I met my husband, we married and moved from Boulder to Golden, and he had to move a whole bunch of bins of soap and said, “Maybe you should try selling this.” I did my first craft fair in 2011 and sold out by 1:00 in the afternoon.
People were handing me beer and money, taking away the soap. I thought, “This is fun.” I did more craft fairs the next year, started getting wholesale requests. Quite honestly, the company happened by accident and I’ve gotten on for the ride. Since then, April of 2012, I quit my day job and went all-in on Spinster Sisters. It’s been quite a journey since then.
The first question is do you still sell for beer?
Always.
Now yourself manufacturing, you’ve been doing that. Let’s talk about COVID. The pandemic breaks out and how do you respond? You respond by saying, “There are going to be some things that people want that they didn’t want before,” like, masks, spray, hand sanitizer and so forth. How did that pop into your mind and how did you decide to seize that?
Previously, we had sold hand sanitizer mostly for our own use. We did sell it to a few stores, but we had it on the chopping block to discontinue it. I’m a little news-obsessed. I was watching what was happening in China and seeing what was going on with COVID. I came back to my team and said, “Now is not the time to discontinue hand sanitizer.”
We went through the process of registering with FDA, getting our monograph for the label. We could see the supply chain issues coming like a freight train towards us. We went to one of our suppliers and said, “We need a bunch of bottles and pumps.” I ended up buying 200,000 bottles and pumps, which was a purchase order that I have never put anything like that in before.
We went back to one of our customers and said, “This is how many hand sanitizers we have. How much of this do you want so we can allocate it to other customers.” They came back and said, “We want it all.” Overnight, most of our product’s sales slowed down and hand sanitizers are what we did every day for two months. Probably three weeks into the pandemic, we’re dealing with coffee breath and things like that in our masks. We came up with a mask spray which was one of the first aromatherapy mask sprays out there and that was an amazing seller for us. We’re still selling it, which is surprising.
Pivoting Business: Skincare is such a crowded market. You need to differentiate your brand so that there’s nothing else like you on the market right now.
We’ll be wearing masks in some form or another forever. That’s a reality.
We would not have had that capability if we were using co-manufacturers. We tried to reach out to a co-manufacturer to try to get more made. They said, “You’re looking at several months before you could get anything.” It would have been a struggle to make it through that first six months of the pandemic if we hadn’t been able to pivot like that.
One of the things that is interesting, self-manufacturing, you naturally grew into it because you started self-manufacturing as a hobby. Certainly, one of the advantages you called out, which is the ability to be far more nimble, agile, adjust and meet trends, but there’s also the challenge of it. It’s easy and you fall prey to this, I’m sure you’re comfortable sharing it, to proliferating the number of SKUs because it’s hard to say no to opportunities and no to request and then suddenly, you’re making a lot more SKUs than you ever plan to make. How much challenge has that created for you? Do you see that as both an advantage and a disadvantage? Talk to me about the SKU lineup.
We, at one point, had four retail stores of our own. You can’t fill a skincare retail store of your own with 20 SKUs. Not to mention, I love formulating new products. I’m probably our worst enemy when it comes to all of this. It was easy when we had a customer coming in and saying, “It’d be great if you would make this product.” We hear it again from another customer and, “We’ll make it then.”
Our SKU count got out of control. I’m embarrassed to say that we were over 400 SKUs at one point. It’s been several years process trying to look at where we need to be. We can’t be all things to everyone. Trying to determine what our niche is and how do we maximize sales on those products. It’s been a ton of work going through that SKU rationalization and trying to figure out what we want to be in the end.
It’s been a cool process because it’s led you now to this new innovation and the focus of Free From line. It is one of the themes listening this conversation but also knowing you is that you’re constantly watching what’s going on around you. The news, what’s happening in the world, what’s happening locally, all of those things, which is challenging for a lot of entrepreneurs because we’re so often our heads are down in our work transactionally.
That’s all we’re doing, to lift up and to try to go, “There are some macro trends here. There are some things happening here. Maybe I could take advantage of those.” That’s been a strength of yours and Spinster Sisters, and that’s led you to this Free From line because it’s a response to some of the realities in the market from the challenges around shipping, especially around shipping things that are heavy with water, to the overuse and the issues with plastics.
Let’s share a little bit about the line itself because it’s cool and it’s also the first time in my career where I’ve had conversations with founders around my level of stink and my armpit here. Those were two topics that I had never had to have conversations with the founder until Kelly. Let’s share with everyone a little bit about the Free From line, what it is and why you developed it? How listening and taking the signal spotting, is the way I would term it, helped you recognize this opportunity to find your niche.
I should probably start with a little bit about myself. I grew up in Boulder. I have been natural products and foods junky for most of my life. By some strange happening, I met my husband, who’s a physicist working in solar research. We both are rabid about natural, renewable and sustainable. When I started the company, that was immediately a piece of what we were all about. I’m always trying to think in every product that we make, “How can we make this in a way that it’s the most sustainable product out there?” We’ve used share game plastics and post-consumer waste plastics. We’ve tried cardboard containers. We’ve run the gamut of trying to find the most sustainable solutions.
Something that’s been highlighted during the pandemic is that people are realizing that what you put on your body is as important as what you put in your body. We are also conscious about using care clean plant-based ingredients. Most of our competitors in the marketplace are using preservatives that are made from petroleum products like phenoxyethanol. Our preservative is made with non-GMO radish root and coconut ferment.
We have taken it to a level that isn’t seen on the marketplace now, but even still, we’re paying to sun lotions and things like that that are majority water around the globe and that’s not a good ecological imprint that we’re making. We started thinking. We’ve had solid shampoos, it’s all conditioner bars for several years, and it wasn’t until the pandemic started that blew up and we are seeing unbelievable growth on that.
We started talking about it one day and my business development manager said, “We should look at more solid products.” We started talking about it, what the possibilities were there, and it became still exciting to see how far we could take this. We are launching a Free From line that is free from water and plastics. They’re all packaged in biodegradable paperboard boxes that are printed with soy-based inks and zero preservatives. They are pure, clean, plant-based ingredients, fair trade shea and coco butter, sustainable palm oil.
We have run the whole gamut with it and looked at every possibility to make sure that we’re taking the most sustainable step. It has been exciting and I cannot wait to get it launched in out there. We have the shampoo and conditioner. We have deodorant in a bar form. We have a body butter bar and sugar scrub bar in a couple of scents and face care. We have a face cleanser bar and a blue tansy oil and hyaluronic acid face serum bar. We’re excited about that.
I’ve been using the deodorant and the body lotion bar. They’re great products. That’s the cool thing. How do you think if you’re looking 3 or 4 years ahead, do you think that this represents the majority of the Spinster Sisters business?
Skincare is such a crowded market. We’ve struggled to differentiate ourselves even with the clean plant-based ingredients. We’ve struggled to differentiate the brand and there’s nothing else like this on the market now. We have gotten much interest from buyers already, that I want to focus on this because I feel better about what we’re putting out there, getting rid of plastics and things like that. This line could continue to expand while we discontinue other SKUs and become our primary business.
One of the things that lead you towards, it’s been this difficult decision for you and recognition that up until now, you’ve done all of this, which is something that is much in line with the tardigrade mentality. You’ve done all of this self-funding, you’ve done this all on the backs of you and the business itself, but you recognize that in order to accelerate the growth of the brand and to take full advantage of this window of opportunity with the Free From line, raising some outside growth capital is necessary and required, which is interesting because the way I first met Kelly is through the Hirshberg Entrepreneurial Institute.
She was part of the Pitch Day and she pitched. I remember afterward commenting to a few of my colleagues on the thing like, “That is one experienced pitcher. She knows how to pitch.” I said that to Kelly afterward, “You have pitched shops. You’ve done this for a long time.” She said, “That was my first pitch ever,” which was both great and horrifying because it put it in her brain that now the bar was set high. You made this decision to go out and start raising capital. What have you learned about the business yourself, the process so far in doing that?
I felt like we’ve reached a point now where we had to raise capital. When we first started the company, we were selling to spas, gift shops and things like that. If they want your products, they pay for it. You send it out and you’re done. I always wanted to be in the natural world because I feel like that’s our tribe. In 2019 we pivoted the company.
That’s when we closed the retail stores. We changed our pricing model. We started the process of reducing our SKU count to fit into the natural and mass grocery channel. What I wasn’t prepared for when I made that change was the trade span. It’s a different model on how you’re selling to customers and things like that.
Pivoting Business: Sometimes, pivoting your company’s focus can be a good thing. You have a much smaller product offering to focus on, so you’re more efficient and happier. You don’t have to keep up with many different skews.
We started with whole foods and we have grown organically over the last couple of years, but I’ve realized, and especially on our direct-to-consumer sales, it’s all been organic growth. We’ve never invested in growing that channel. I realized that if we want to grow the company, we’re going to have to have some financial backing to make it happen.
We have such a great opportunity with this new line that we have to have that backing, to invest in it, and get it out there to everyone. When I started the company, it never even occurred to me to think about this, but one way started learning about distribution and things like that. It became apparent that we weren’t going to be able to grow unless we invested in it like this.
What has it been like inviting investors to look into the business and start having those conversations? What have you learned in that process so far? The good, the bad, the ugly.
It’s scary because I’ve done what I’ve thought has been best for the business to get it to this point. You have the experts digging into the business and saying, “Why did you make this choice? Why did you make this decision? Why do you have an SBA loan? Where did that go to?” Things like that that I’ve never had to answer to before. That part is intimidating.
It’s been apparent to me how much I think that broad SKU count heard us over time. Now that our production team has a much smaller product offering to focus on, they’re much more efficient and happier. We can power out the work instead of trying to keep up with that many different SKUs. It’s improved our profitability and gross profit margin. I don’t think that we could have survived if we had continued down that path, quite honestly.
As it relates to raising capital and so forth, has it changed your view of the long-term of this business? Has it adjusted it from being a business that you’re building long-term to now a business that maybe you’re building for a potential acquisition? Are you still focused on running Spinster Sisters the same way and inviting the right investors in?
When I started the company, it never even occurred to me that this would be an option. It was more of a fun thing to do. I love this business so much that I can’t ever see myself not being a part of it but it’s transformed. I’m also getting older. That makes you think about things. I am putting everything that I have into this business because I’m passionate about the products and helping consumers use cleaner products, education, and relationship building. It’s all something that I love doing. It has changed now to where I would love to see building the business at this point for sale and then being more consultative after that.
One of the things that you and I have talked a lot about, and you’ve recognized in yourself, is this need to make sure that you’re doing things to nurture yourself as a founder so that you can show up the best. Some of the fun things of light have been working from a campsite and making sure that you’re taking time to get away or change the field of vision a bit so forth. What have you learned through the pandemic about making the importance of taking care of yourself as an entrepreneur?
The pandemic, for everyone, has been difficult, but I almost felt guilty at the beginning of the pandemic because people were home with their families and my employees were at work, putting their lives on the line. I know that sounds dramatic but that’s the reality of being around other people. I felt like I had to be there. My employees were there. I have employees working remotely that would be working on nights or weekends.
I put it on myself that I felt like I had to be there 24 hours a day, every day, to be available for them because they were out there doing the work. I put myself, my husband and my family on the side and became entrenched in what we were doing day to day, including me being out there, making hand sanitizer with everyone. I lost sight of where we take the company in the future, how I make sure that I can show up every day and be there for my team in a good way.
It was a difficult process for me to work through. I’ve been working on trying to find that work-life balance and we bought a travel trailer, which is something that I never thought I wanted in my life, but it turns out I love it. We’ve been going and working remotely. It’s been transformative for me because I have time away from people coming at my office all day long and being in the minutia of the daily operations of the business to take a step back.
Where the Free From line came from is our first trip. I took a step back and went, “Where do we go from here? We’re in a crowded market. How do we build this business in the best way possible, most sustainable products and differentiate ourselves?” That’s having that week of being out of the minutia was unbelievable.
That’s such an important thing. We’re alluding to it. We often confuse activity with results. We get caught up in the minutia, especially when we’re stressing out about how the business is doing and all of those things. It feels like the right response to work our asses off. To dig in and not come up for ear but there are some challenges there.
First of all, when our heads are down working in the business, we’re rarely working on the business. As an entrepreneur, as a founder, you have to divide that time. You have to be willing to work in the business in the trenches, in the minutia, but you also have to spend the time to work on it. “What’s next? Where are we going? What’s our vision? What’s our culture?” All of those things. No matter what size your business and where you are.
You can’t do that when you’re caught head down. What happens for a lot of businesses is, because of that, opportunities fly by. Windows are opened and closed before you even recognize them. Slowing down, lifting up, walking away, stepping away, giving yourself headspace, that is sometimes the most important investment you can make in your business.
Even though it feels like you’re being selfish or feels like maybe you’re not doing the work that you should be doing, I would argue it’s the opposite. The other thing is, as you’ve witnessed, that recharge and disconnection, you’re still going to work. I call them workcations. You’re still going to put those hours in, but the hours that you’re putting in are going to be more intense, effective, efficient and then you have all these hours of not.
You’re recharging, re-establishing relationships with your family, and spending some of that headspace where the ideas germinate, percolate and so forth. When you come back, you show up better. The business and the employees recognize it. You say it’s transformative. It’s transformative for you, but I guarantee you, it’s also transformative for Spinster Sisters, the company.
When you have employees, it’s sometimes nice when the boss is gone for a little while. Even the coolest boss, having them gone for a little bit, it’s nice. It’s good for everybody. A couple of other questions for you to share, as a female founder, what would you share from your experience? You’ve been doing this for many years. What would you share with other aspiring or current female founders?
I’m lucky that I’m in Colorado because there’s such a great support system out there for founders in general, but also some focused support for female founders. I also made sure, and this was something my mom drove home with me, is that it’s important to get women on business certified because it’s such a great network of female founders that you can call on. Education seminars do that.
There are discounts even with distributors and retailers for diversity-owned companies. Building that network of female founders to support you is important. There’s a much larger group of male founders out there certainly in big companies. We don’t necessarily have the access that men do to capital and to opportunities. It’s been helpful to build a network of female founders to talk things out with.
That’s important advice, not just for female founders but for everyone. We talk a lot about this amongst all the brands at TIG and that is community. Specifically, the three types of community we talk about, we all focus on our consumer community, but the other two, collaborators and champions. You have to be surrounded by people you can collaborate with, think with, support one another. It’s healthy. It also creates opportunity and new thinking, and then champions. Everyone deserves, needs, and should look for champions that can come alongside them on this journey. These are the people that can open doors, knock down walls, or be out there and be evangelical for you.
Pivoting Business: Building a community is important. It is nice to have people to bounce ideas off of and help you make decisions so you don’t second guess.
You deserve that. For everyone reading, I find entrepreneurs, and I am one, it took me a long time to recognize it. Entrepreneurs are the change agents and the individuals who are most capable and most positioned to move all of the things that need to be moved in society forward. I used to think that entrepreneurs were just risk-takers. They were the same people out base jumping and doing those things, but that’s not true. The distribution of risk as an individual follows the same pattern as it does for anybody else. I’ve been around entrepreneurs. They’re cool with risks and they do like base-jumping, hang-gliding or jumping out of airplanes.
There are plenty of them who are terrified about any decision and doing everything. The difference that I’ve noticed between entrepreneurs and those that never become entrepreneurs is that those would never become entrepreneurs, normal people, they see risk in taking action, stepping into the unknown, doing something. Entrepreneurs are the exact opposite. They see the risk in inaction.
The risk for them is, “If I never did this, would I regret it? If somebody else does this, am I going to be pissed? If we’re not solving this problem, will it ever get solved? If we’re not changing this issue, will it ever get changed?” The risk in the entrepreneurial mind is the risk of not doing, the risk of not taking action. That’s it. It doesn’t mean you’re any less terrified and less stressed about it. It means that not doing it was not an option.
That’s the way I have lived my life, though, quite honestly. I’ve spent the season at South Pole and I packed up everything and moved to Portola. What living means to me is making those leaps.
Were you raised that way or the opposite?
I was raised the opposite.
Where do you think that came from? Is that innate? Is it a lesson you learned? I’m always fascinated by that.
I don’t know where it came from. Growing up, we had a huge Catholic family and everything was sedate. When I finally moved out of the house after college, I wanted to see the world and explore. I started working in travel, traveling the world. That job leads me to work for the USA Antarctic Program. I did that, booked travel for the US Antarctic Program for a couple of years. Why does everybody get to go to Antarctica above me? I switched my job there so that I could go to South Pole. It evolved over time. I feel like there’s much to see and do and experience out there. I feel like people hurt themselves if they don’t experience other cultures and things like that. It was not the way my family was. It was the wild hair that I got.
I’m always fascinated by that because it usually isn’t. Sometimes families can empower their kids to have that curiosity by sharing that with them and being curious. Sometimes, it’s just an interest in trying to see things differently. That’s why you’re doing what you’re doing because you see things differently, and it’s critical. For those reading, you’ve been doing this now longer than many and you’re doing things slightly differently. You’ve spent years bootstrapping yourself manufactured. What lessons would you want to impart upon those that maybe are earlier on the journey that you wish you knew then?
I am going back to building the community, although it probably doesn’t sound like it from what I said about traveling the world and stuff. I am an introvert at heart, so building that community has been challenging for me but I cannot stress enough how important it is and how nice it is to have people to bounce ideas off of and going along with that. I was a business analyst at night, managed companies, but I did not have any experience starting my own company. What’s been a challenge for me is second-guessing myself when people say, “Why are you doing this? Should I be doing it a different way? Should I not be self-manufacturing? Should I not be getting investors?”
It’s hard not to second-guess yourself and the decisions you make, but I’ve started of late. Probably, later in running this business, realizing that I do know what I’m doing and that my instincts are right, believing in those choices and decisions. Nothing proved that better than this pandemic has. Believing in yourself and knowing that you can do this is everything.
I say this all the time because I know it’s true for me, and for many that I talked to, it’s true for them. As entrepreneurs, we have these two constant companions, one on each shoulder. They’re chirping in our ears constantly. One of them is fear and the other one is doubt. It’s easy to listen to those. It’s easy to listen to doubt, “I don’t know if I can make this decision. I don’t know if I’m a strong enough leader. I don’t know if I’m smart enough.” Fear, like, “What if I do this? What if?” What is hard is to trust yourself enough to not listen and go against the grain because that’s the other reality.
People come to me often because I’ve been doing this for so long, seeking advice. I’m always wanting to give advice, but also, at the same time, there’s a good chance that doing it my way will be the wrong way because I have a paradigm. I have 30 years plus of doing this. I see things this way. You have beginner’s mind. You’re not encumbered by the amassed experiences that I am.
That lack of encumbrance may serve you better than the advice I’m about to give you. Even when you do seek advice, don’t feel that you’re always compelled to accept it to be true. Take the stuff in, seek advice, but don’t allow it to institutionalize out of your own gut or intuition. That’s a tough balance because you also don’t want to go, “He’s full of shit. I’m not going to listen to what he said.”
You want to challenge your thinking, but at the same time, not do what everybody else is doing, because that’s what we see in this industry. We see a rush to the same things. When people have successes, you can watch it. When there’s a pattern of success, then you’ll see a lot of people running that same playbook until it becomes no longer an effective strategy and then they chase to the next. The most successful entrepreneurs go, “Everybody is running over there. I’m going the other way. I’m going to do something different.” That takes confidence in yourself, courage, and a bit of stubbornness.
I got plenty of that.
We all do. You wouldn’t be doing this if down deep, there wasn’t a bit of that in there.
It’s a great analogy because that’s what Free From is all about for us. We are running exactly the opposite direction as everyone else and we’ll see how it works out.
That’s what being an entrepreneur is. One of the things I did in the previous episodes was I talked about the fact that entrepreneurialism and innovation are hand in hand. What I see a lot is that entrepreneurs innovate their products, ideas, and dreams and so forth, but then they check the innovation at the door when it cost, which way you follow the execute then that you start trying to do what everybody else is doing.
When you continue to challenge that and run the other way, you may crash and burn. The chances of success are higher because you’re not running to the middle. It’s an interesting thing. Tell everybody a bit if they want to learn more about Free From. If they want to order the product online, if they want to connect with you and hang out or whatever, how best to do those things?
On social, we’re everywhere, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, all those things. Our website has a wholesale application. If you’re interested in the Free From line, fill that out and we can send you additional information on it. We have sales at SpinsterSistersCo.com if you want to get ahold of the sales team. My email is Kelly@SpinsterSistersCo.com. You’re welcome to reach out to me for anything. We’ve already got a couple of retailers that have committed to taking on the Free From line. Hopefully, you all will see it in a store near you.
If you are an investor reading this and you’re interested in learning more about Spinster Sisters and their current raise, please reach out to her. Thanks for joining. I hope everyone has a great day. Thanks for doing this with me. It was awesome. I mean this in all sincerity. You are inspirational to me. I love what you’re doing, your energy, and the fact that you’re constantly challenging yourself to think differently, be different, and build a better company. It’s emblematic of what many other founders are trying to do. Thanks for jumping in with me and doing this relatively last minute.
Thanks for having me. This is fun.
Everyone, thanks. We’ll see you next time.
Important Links
About Kelly Perkins
Entrepeneur – Founder and CEO of Spinster Sisters Co.
Spinster Sisters Co – the very BEST natural skin care available. Love my job, love living in CO, love my cute dogs, and love me some spicy margarita’s.
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