SEASON 2 EPISODE 7 WITH

Episode Transcript +

Sleep like three US Presidents and also help change lives

A conversation with Boll and Branch CEO Scott Tannen

Season 2, Episode 7

Guests: Scott Tannen, CEO and founder of Boll and Branch

AARON KWITTKEN: Broadcasting from the 10 Hudson Square Building, home of WNYC Radio in Soho, New York, welcome to Brand on Purpose, the podcast dedicated to uncovering the untold stories behind the most impactful purpose-driven companies.

My guest today is Scott Tannen, CEO and founder of Boll and Branch, a luxury and sustainable home brand. Scott disrupted the textile industry for the better in 2014, by launching by Boll and Branch as the world’s first fair-trade certified bedding company with his co-founder and life partner and wife, Missy Tannen. Scott’s commitment and mindful manufacturing was the force behind the choice to use 100% organic cotton, which has enhanced the lives of many cotton farmers in India, which we will talk about.

This purpose-driven approach coupled with pristine products has given Boll and Branch the title The World’s Most Ethical Cotton Sheets Brand, something many consumers, including myself and multiple Presidents, I like to say that in the same sentence, has been drawn to.

Prior to founding Boll and Branch, Scott spent several years building online marketing campaigns for beloved consumer brands like Altoids, Planter’s and my favorite, Oreo’s. I like the thin Oreo’s. With Scott’s innovative and purpose-driven nature, he has led Boll and Branch to transform sleep and create an incredible impact on deserving communities. And, they just closed in on raising a $100 million dollar round just a month ago. Scott Tannen, welcome to Brand on Purpose.

SCOTT TANNEN: Thank you so much for having me, glad to be here.

AK: I’m incredibly excited as a fanboy of Boll and Branch, we sleep on your sheets. We also have your towels. We should mention that. My family sleeps on your sheets. I’m really happy to have you on. And if you could start by talking a little bit about the inspiration behind founding the company. You, kind of like me, have a marketing background. You’re a digital marketing guy. Had a very good career working for some incredible brands. And then you decided to take the leap. What was it that made you decide to take that leap? And just, by the way, what, five years ago. Incredible success.

ST: Yeah, I mean, like a lot of times, you never look at it as the leap. It’s a whole bunch of baby steps and all of a sudden you turn around and you look backwards and you say, “Ok, I took a leap.” But when you’re in the process there’s not a pivotal moment that you say, “Ok, I’m just going to spend every bit of my savings. I’m going to wire it to somebody in India and hope that a boat shows up in eight months with some sheets on it and then I’ll be good, right?” It’s never that drastic.

But, for me, you know I was in the marketing space but really more on the digital side. And anybody that sort of grew up in that space in the early 2000’s, you know, I was proud to both be the head of and the most junior person in the digital marketing department. I was the entire thing. And so, what I realized over time was that I’ve been operating independently within a larger organization and all those safety nets since the very start of my career.

But doing what entrepreneurs do, which is trying to blaze the path forward verses trying to find your way through the path, if that makes any sense. So, that’s the essence of a start up. I didn’t know anything about bed linens. I didn’t know anything about making textiles. But I saw that there was an opportunity to do it better than the options that were available to me as a consumer, and that was my starting point, to say, why did the options have to stink? Why are really there no brands? And why, as a consumer, am I not sure what to buy?

Using your analogy with Oreo’s, you know, if you want a cookie, there’s no shortage of proven good options out there. You know what you’re going to get when you bite into an Oreo. You know what you’re going to get when you bite into a Chips Ahoy, or anything else for that matter. But, when it comes to bedding and it comes to our sheets, we all sleep on the product. We don’t really know what makes something feel awesome versus the ones that you’re like, oh my gosh, this is sandpaper.

And so, you know, it doesn’t take a whole lot of digging to realize there’s always been a lot more salesmanship and marketing than real product, um, in the mix. And I think as most real marketers know, a great product makes you a better marketer.

AK: How did you come up with bedding, though? I mean, you saw the opportunity but was there like a spark? And I ask because we had the founder and CEO of Care/of, you know, the vitamin pack company, a few months ago. And his thing was, he got confused. He knew, like you, he knew nothing about vitamins. But, he did get frustrated when he was walking through the aisles of CVS or Walgreen’s because there’s too many choices.

It’s a lot of marketing but not a lot of substance and he felt like there was a better way forward. Did you have that moment as well, or was it a collection of moments that led you specifically to this product? Well, when it comes to sheets and towels and bedding and what not.

ST: 100% I had a moment and it occurred when we were, Missy and I were redoing our master bedroom. So we were moving from a queen bed to a king bed, which is sort of like, as we also seen through our own research, this is like a major pivotal, adulting moment for people. So, they may start in a queen bed but they got their sheets when they registered for their wedding, or their mom hooked them up, which was the case in our case.

Like our first purchase together, Missy’s mom bought us our sheets. That was about the last we thought of it. And all of a sudden, we’re getting a king bed and Missy came back from the mall and was like, “You know there’s so many choices and I don’t know.” I mean, she was just distraught and was beside herself. And I actually, it only stuck out to me because I thought, “This is one of the most ridiculous things in the world that your day is confounded by the fact that you can’t pick out bed sheets. Like, how hard could this be?”

AK: It’s a first-world problem, right?

ST: Yeah, exactly. And of course, being who I am, and pretty much believing I know everything whether I do or don’t, I was like, well let me figure this out. And the first thing that I did, and I remember going to Google. And I was like, well I know thread counts important so let me look up what makes, what’s the best thread count? Like, what should I ideally look for? And when I did that, I found, I just ran into this wall.

You know thread count doesn’t have anything to do with quality. It really only has to do with how many threads are per square inch. And really simply, you can pack a lot of really crummy threads in a square inch of fabric. It has a high thread count, but feels like crap. So this is like, eight, nine o’clock at night and I just fell into the rabbit hole. Like, man, why it is so hard for me to just buy sheets? And my goal was to just truly prove to my wife that once again I figured it out with the power of the internet and buy us a great set of sheets.

By the next morning, I had stayed up until like four in the morning and I said to Missy, “I’m going to start a sheets company.” It is way too hard to buy a set of sheets and everything out there is garbage because you start finding things like, you know, Egyptian cotton, all the little bits of information I actually knew or thought I knew proved out to be just made up. Egyptian cotton, like, doesn’t even come from Egypt, most of it’s grown in other places. It’s just sort of like, a brand name or something like that.

And so, I just left feeling like we can’t be the only ones that have this problem. Now, it wasn’t like that was the moment that, as you said, I took the leap and decided to shut everything in my life down and go after it, but I did start really trying to research and understand how the textile industry worked. And the deeper I dug, the more I found that the status quo was just terrible. It was terrible for consumers. It was terrible for the makers. Really, nobody was winning outside of four or five really big garment and textile importers. And so, I looked at that as this is a highly fragmented market where no brand is winning, and we can win.

AK: So my highly uninformed, not researched theory is that it, kind of like in the furniture industry where you have three or four large kind of white label makers making everything for a bunch of retailers. Is that how it used to work or is that how it mostly works in the bedding industry?

ST: It still works that way.

AK: Ok.

ST: Yeah, it still works that way. And so you have everybody from the big box retailers that might carry, like, you know, an 80's supermodel as their license. Private label from the same mill that their house brand is private labeled from that everything else is and what’s crazy is there’s other start ups that have actually have done reasonably well that launched around the same time as us that they’re literally private labeling the same junk that you’re buying at some of these stores.

And they’re positioning them as luxury products and the reality is, it’s like, you know I’ve been in your factory I know what you’re selling and you’re selling something that Walmart is selling for $9 for sheets that for $169 and saying, designed in this cool city by these hipsters and whatever and so all aspects and all phases of the market, the status quo just had not been challenged and still is rarely challenged. It’s only just starting to start, starting to happen now because I think people have realized like, whoa, Boll and Branch is something that’s a little bit differently and has actually started to babbling up a fair amount of market share because the customer’s do want better.

AK: How big is the market?

ST: In the US, it’s you know about a $3-$5 billion dollar a year market and that’s just bed linens. As you start broadening the market it gets much larger as you start thinking about towels and, you know and obviously, you tack on about $12 billion dollars for mattresses, and furniture and window treatments and kitchen textiles and home textiles starts to become, you know, really a pretty big market.

AK: There are people, just based on your own research so far, people buying, it’s obviously an incredible product, or suite of products. Are they buying it for that or because the sustainability narrative? Which I think comes through, in some ways, but I feel like your messaging on the quality and challenging the status quo and being able to say, you can get better for less, is also very prominent. Can you talk a little bit about the different layers of narratives when it comes to speaking to the consumer?

ST: Yeah, sure. Um, people don’t want to sleep on a sustainable bed, they want to sleep on a comfortable one. And so, I think, like all businesses and all categories, if you don’t have an exceptional product, this is before any of the marketing starts, you’re just the noise before you end up going on out business at some point. And I think there’re a lot of brands and a lot of categories that have had these incredibly explosive starts that all of a sudden the trendiness was not backed up with a strong product and they start sizzling and disappear as soon as they arrive on the scene.

In our case, we understand that people will buy our product for the first time because of how it feels, because of how great the sheets feel when they’re in their bed. What they choose to talk about when they’re with their friends, when they, you know, they kind of say they buy us for our quality but they love us for everything we stand behind. And so, we think about, we are obviously a very socially conscious and socially driven company.

The reason 100% of people that work at this company work at this company, is because of what we believe and how we’ve really built a very differentiated textile supply chain, that for the first time, I think, in certainly modern human history, is across the board truly lifting people up.

And there are other brands like Patagonia and what not, that I think have done something very similar. But just like Patagonia, if you’re going to freeze your butt off on the side of the mountain, you’re probably not buying a Patagonia coat, despite the fact that it’s a brand that you know its hard not to have an affinity for how much they care about the products that they make and the people that make them.

So what we find is our true believers come back and repeat purchase again, and again and again. I mean nearly half the people that buy a Boll and Branch product buy something again within a year. That’s nearly unheard of in the home textiles business.

AK: It is. And it, was sustainability always part- it sounds like it was part of the business plan from day one.

ST: Well, it wasn’t part of the business plan as much as it was part of Missy and my values, right? I mean, if we’re going to start this from scratch, how do we not make every choice possible? You know, we knew we were not going to accept giant mill #6 in China, or Bangladesh or India and pick model 12 off the shelf and private label it. Like, to me it’s like, if you’re an entrepreneur, why bother? That’s not, you know, that’s all about how do I make money?

AK: Right. ‘Cause that’s the easy way out, right? That’s the easy way to do it.

ST: Totally, and like anything in life, there’s a lot of ways to make money as an entrepreneur but I don’t think true entrepreneurs really think about how much money am I gonna make? How much money is the company going to make, and how quickly? They really think about, how am I going to make an impact on groups of people?

And so, from the very beginning, as we started learning about, you know, how opaque the supply chains were in a lot of these traditional importers and exporters and factories, I found myself reverse engineering their supply chain. I was learning more about a lot of these, you know, there’s a company that makes in Italy and they make for a lot of huge companies as well as they make for some start ups, and you know, everything’s made in Italy, and all of a sudden I reverse engineered their supply chain and found out that the, basically the labeling and last of the finishing is done in Italy.

Everything else for their product is done in China, as well as their Egyptian cotton is grown on the premise of this factory in China where people are paid not in money but in credits that they can use for the commissary at this factory, while they live there and they have the ability to leave, right, so they say their not slaves, but their cost to leave is the equivalent of about 10 years pay. So nobody really can.

AK: Which is indentured servitude basically, yeah.

ST: It’s exactly! It’s absolutely indentured servitude. It’s slavery. It’s modern slavery.

AK: Right.

ST: Right? And so I heard someone speak once, it’s like, just because you have a cell phone and access to information doesn’t mean you’re not a slave. And so you start seeing this. And you see it again and again and again. And we felt that, all right, we’ve got to start over from scratch. And I do remember, there were two pivotal learnings and all of that. The first learning was, you know, when you learn that a conventional cotton farmer in India, that their life expectancy is 35. And that’s not just cause they’re walking in the fields and hand applying really, really dangerous chemicals and pesticides.

They don’t have irrigation, they don’t have safety equipment, so for their entire lives, these chemicals and pesticides which, think about it this way, cotton’s like 3 – 5% of the worlds crops and 25 - 35% of the world’s chemicals and pesticides, right, so really, really heavy impact on the environment, right? And so, it leaches into the soil so badly, you can’t rotate crops, you can’t plant food, but worst of all, all the stuff leaches into the soil which finds it’s way into the ground water which goes into the water supply so people in these villages who don’t have education and don’t understand the dangers, they’re consuming this stuff from the time they’re children, right?

So you have really, really bad things happening in these villages, which as far as most of us as American consumers, we don’t even know exist. Like whether you know you’re shopping at the biggest of big box retailer or somebody smaller like us, direct to consumer, these are the people who are responsible for making those products, you know, and so we just felt that that’s a status quo we could not get involved in.

So we started with the cotton source. And we started by understanding organic cotton and understanding parts of India that had laws against genetically modified seeds and GMO farming, but the problem was it didn’t have a lot of demand, right? And so, here you have these villages that are now working together to try to grow a cash crop in a much more sustainable way, but there wasn’t demand and, we were very small in the beginning, but I said, “Look, I’m gonna put my dollars here.”

And because the product’s more expensive in terms of organic cotton, both because the supply is lower and because of what we pay is equivalent to the living wage. We ignore the commodity price unless the commodity price is higher, which it probably wouldn’t be. And we insure that everybody from whom we buy cotton is living above the living wage, which means above the poverty line. That’s actually very rare. Most cotton products that you have are made by somebody living below the poverty line.

And what we’ve also done is work with fair trade to apply premiums that we can help them with specific projects. Everything from trade skills to medical and health services, clean water, education, which obviously is most important, right? All the folks that are farming, they have families just like me. What do I want? I want a better life for my kids and that’s what they want. So we try to make sure that every step in the chain and it starts there and goes right through all of our factories, it lifts people up.

But what we have to do, is we found that there’s so much bloat and fat and middlemen actually to the backside of supply chain. So, normally people say cut out the middleman, they’re buying something from a product and selling it direct to consumer, right? So they’re cutting out the wholesale markup, which you know every direct-to-consumer brand does. But really, there’s way more middlemen put between the factory and the original source of the raw material. So we've had to cut all of them out and build our own supply chain. And lo and behold, we ended up with a much higher quality product than is available. Everybody in the supply chain from the farmers to the factory workers makes more money, and the customer is paying about half.

AK: Right, but I will say that the middleman or men or really kind of mobsters in that scenario, right? Unless you do it yourself.

ST: Yes. Totally.

AK: Yeah. How did you find these villages and these farmers? That sounds like an impossible…

ST: Google.

AK: Really? Wow.

ST: No joke. I started researching articles, I remember an article in The Guardian that I read that was written in like 2012 about a small cooperative in India called Chetna. And the article talked about how they were harvesting seeds and trying to insulate their communities from contamination from genetically modified farming because the area of India that they were in, it was in the process or had been outlawed and I just became completely fascinated by it.

And I literally found their website, which wasn’t the most sophisticated and I emailed them and I said, “Alright, my name’s Scott. I don’t know anything about textiles but I think I want to buy your crop. And then I’m going to figure out what to do with it.” And they wrote back, and we had a bunch of Skype calls. And they ended up connecting me, they’re like, “Well, I don’t know anybody that can make bedding, but this guy can make t-shirts.” I was like, all right, that’s a start!

AK: Right, right.

ST: You know, I’m calling these different factories and it literally, it started with Google and just reading and consuming as much information as I could. And finding ways to reach out, and spending some time on an airplane and doing those sorts of things to ultimately find, you know, various segments of a garment supply chain that we could work with and actually help turn into a high performing home goods supply chain. And that’s what we’ve done.

AK: Is there any way possible that you could go back to those farmers and those families in Bangladesh where I think you said the average life expectancy’s 35, and change that? Or change their life? Or is that kind of gone at this point?

ST: No, in fact, it’s in India. And there’s nothing I’m more proud of than to say that we’re having a major impact. We’re now the largest consumer of fair trade organic cotton in the world. And so this initial cooperative where our first order was maybe going to consume a couple percentage points of their overall supply, you know, and they had some other brands buying small amounts.

We’re buying all of their cotton, um, and have brought in other brands and so now, this cooperative is selling now nearly 100% of their cotton into the premium marketplace as well as about four others. So anywhere from 10 to 50 thousand farmers, you know certainly tens of thousands of farmers in the developing world are living above the poverty line now because brands like Boll and Branch are being more considerate about their sourcing.

I don’t think there’s another home brand of scale, um, that’s engaging but again, you have brands like Prana that are doing a lot, and really being considerate about how and from where they source. So, you’re starting to see this shift towards more sustainable and ethical procurement of raw materials because you can’t hide from the fact, you have brands like us and others that are telling these stories. You know, what are you going to do if you’re a mass market brand and you’re saying, “Yeah, yeah we’re gonna ignore that?” You can only ignore it to a certain point.

AK: You literally can’t sleep at night, no pun intended. How can you possibly sleep at night knowing that? But now you’re raising that, you’re shining a light on that.

ST: Yeah, and look, I mean, I’m sensitive, if you’re a big public company, right, and all of a sudden you’ve got to tell Wall Street, look, our cost structure has to change, this has to change because we’ve been doing some bad things for a long period of time. That is really hard. You look at companies that have had to do it over the years and it’s not fun. It’s an ugly, ugly, ugly thing.

And I have never run a public company, so I can’t exactly relate, but I can only imagine that it’s not quite so simple. Because, you know, you’re gonna nominally be impacting, by making one change, if it has a financial impact on your business, there’s, how many tens of thousands of people who’ve bet their retirement on your business, and now you’re gonna be you know, wagering those.

So there’s always two sides to a scenario. The piece that’s interesting to me is when you see young companies and start ups in apparel and home goods and things like that and Boll and Branch, certainly let’s use home as an example. Boll and Branch has been out there now, I don’t think you’re starting a home goods business and saying you don’t know what our business is and haven’t done some research.

For them they make a conscious decision not to source sustainably, that’s unfathomable to me. It’s- I absolutely can’t wrap my head around that. Like, we published our impact report. We’ve given an instruction book for anybody that wants to source, where you can go, where the factories are, where the farms are, we’ve done all the legwork, we’ve nailed down the supply chain. And anybody else can wind up tapping into that in seconds. And very few are doing it.

AK: Yeah.

ST: Kind of shocking.

AK: Well, you’re right and a common theme with a lot of the companies and brands I’ve been talking to is transparency. And publishing those reports and having it audited by a third party and I applaud you for that. And on a much lighter note, the name Boll and Branch, where did it come from?

ST: Yeah. So if you could picture like a cotton plant, right? You think that white puffy cotton ball. And it grows on a branch.

AK: That’s it!

ST: Pretty simple.

AK: That’s genius.

ST: We know that, symbolically, I think we know that everything we’re going to do and every success we’d have in this business was gonna be based on what we could end up doing with cotton. And so, you know, cotton’s at the core of our business and that’s why it’s in our name, but to be honest, it just, you know, before we launched, we- Missy was sitting with this like, old early 1900s anatomy of a cotton plant and the name just sort of sprung to her and I was like, oh my god, I love it. And we did a quick poll of our friends with that and a few other contenders and it was like nearly unanimous so we became Boll and Branch.

AK: So you don’t need to spend $2 million dollars with like, Interbrand, or one of those companies to come up with a name.

ST: You can, because I hear their Christmas gifts are awesome.

AK: Yeah, right.

ST: But it might not, yeah. Our first logo we did on 99 Designs for $88 dollars.

AK: Sweet. So that’s like Fiver? That’s like Fiver, right?

ST: Yeah, yeah, exactly. It’s maybe a little bit higher end than Fiver, not by much. So, yeah, I mean, it is kind of funny and especially I come from the agency, in between being in the brand space and doing this, I was in the agency world, so I was basically maybe coming to terms with the fact that I may have overcharged people from time to time in my career.

AK: Well, I think the agency world is great training for anything, because if you think about the skill that you put to work to just understand the process, right? So, us agency guys, we have to learn a lot about a lot of things on very short notice and become expert very quickly so we become very efficient with our research methodology, right, and I’m sure that helped you.

ST: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, and, you know, ultimately, every retail business is simply customer service company. And every agency is simply a customer service company. And so there are so many common threads around thinking about everything before your client or your customer has to worry about it that I think are aligned.

AK: Do you remember some of the names that you came up with that might have been terrible that did not make it before Boll and Branch?

ST: Yeah. We had Bolt, which was like, you know, a bolt of material. It’s like a big wheel. We had Change Bed and Bath where we were going to change everything. Those are some really winners there. We had a whole bunch of names that were based on our kid’s initials and you know, the typical stuff. At one point, we had HolySheets.com and then we realized that using sheets in place of shit was kind of juvenile.

AK: Right.

ST: So.

AK: You would have definitely sheeted the bed on that one. The dad jokes are…

ST: That’s a dad joke for sure.

AK: A dad joke, yeah, I’m pretty good at that. I have a whole book of them that my daughter gave me. Talk a little bit about the moment that you decided to actually do this. Quit your day job, your agency job, and I say this because when I started my company, which is very different, a B to B company, I think in some ways is safer.

I remember, I took a second mortgage out on my house, quit my job, I cashed in like old Bar Mitzvah bonds, you know, I mean, I put everything in, like everything. And people were like, “Oh my god, you’re crazy. What are you going to do if it doesn’t work out?” And I was like, “You know, a lot of us are just in debt forever anyhow and I’m mostly employable, so I’ll just get a job.” But I would have had a great regret for not trying. What was that moment like and what did you do to help capitalize the company?

ST: Yeah, so, I will say that it is unfairly, to an unfair extent, it is easier for someone who’s in their, say, 30s, than someone who is say, in their 20s, financially, but much harder because we have a lot more at risk.

AK: Yeah, your financial obligations are huge. Remember, I had a four-year old and a one-year old and a mortgage and then I had another mortgage. Exactly.

ST: Yeah, exactly. So, yep, I had a mortgage, I had three kids. I wasn’t working at the time. I had sold my last company, which was fortunate because I was able to have some proceeds and I gave myself two years of no income to figure something out. And so, I spent most of that two years of reserve in about the first six weeks for our first POs. And then, over the course of the next year, had accumulated five additional mortgages, secondary, on my house, with different banks. I’m not even sure if I was allowed to, but I had like, SVA loans and stuff like that, all personally guaranteed.

AK: Yep.

ST: Ended up taking about $5 million dollars in debt on myself through the SVA. The awesome thing about the SVA is that if you own a house, you can recollateralize it, and recollateralize it and recollateralize it. The downside is, is that if you take $1, you can get $5 million dollars. So, you know, if this didn’t work, I was screwed.

AK: Right.

ST: And Missy kept asking me, she’s like, we’re not going to lose the house are we? And I was like, “No!!! We’re fine!”

AK: It’s just a house. It’s just a house.

ST: Um. You know, I would have been selling sheets out of the back of my truck to figure it out.

AK: You’re like, Missy, we have each other, that’s all that matters.

ST: Yeah, so, for me it was at that time we placed that first PO where I said, “Ok. This is it. We’re gonna do this.” And, again, having given that this wasn’t my first company, I was comfortable with betting on myself and I felt that the opportunity was really great. Perhaps, foolishly, I told myself that, well, worse comes to worst somebody can buy these sheets off me.

But, it was around that first PO and once we did that, I mean, the hardest thing is that you placed a purchase order, now you’ve got like eight months to wait for product to show up in the warehouse. So, during that eight months, I had to name the company. I didn’t have a name before I placed the first PO. I built our website myself, I built all of our advertising and the marketing materials. And I hit up all of our friends in the advertising business for free work, as well, during that period of time, waiting for the product to come in. And, yeah, in hindsight, craziest thing I’ve ever done.

AK: And, yeah, well, you know you talk about selling your other company. And for those of us who are listening to the podcast and are not familiar with the marketing services industry, very few people make F-You money where they sell their company and then they’re done. People like you and me, you know, you might have a year or two, but you, you know, especially where we live, on this coast, we still have to figure something out. Right?

You could have just, kind of, put it to the side and gotten another job, and like a sane person, decided I’m just gonna kind of go on with my life. But no, ‘cause as an entrepreneur you have to have a little bit of insanity. We call it positive insanity, to be able to take that leap, and I have just a lot of respect for you and everybody who’s, all the others who’ve done things like this. And I’m glad you’re able to share that story. It’s important.

ST: Well, look. It’s, and, the most important thing is that to me, building is fun, right? And yes, there’s tons of stress that comes with it. There’s tons of days where things turn inside out or upside down, six times from Sunday. But my worst day here is still pretty darn good. And it’s been like that since the first day we started.

And, I love what I’m doing. I’m incredibly passionate about the people for whom we’re doing and the impact that we’re able to make. Every time we sell a set of sheets, a whole chain of good things start. But I do think that, I see a lot of people that get into the entrepreneurial space, and maybe they’re motivated by the financial aspect. And the problem with that is, on a random garden variety Thursday in April, you realize how far you are from ever being in a spot where you’re ever going to make money. And you’ve got to grind it through.

And if you don’t find joy in kind of grinding it out, it’s the kind of thing that can have massive impact in your mental health, on your family, on your relationships, on everything in your life. And so, you know, not everybody is wired for that. I’m the kind of person that’s wired, if I think back to my days at Kraft and Wrigley, sitting in more of a desk job was, it put constraints on me that actually sucked the, there was no joy in that.

AK: Right.

ST: Other people are able to find joy when they have stability, right? To me, I like that opportunity to create. And everybody’s wired a little bit differently. So when you understand, not just what end point you want, but what day to day you want and how that feels. That makes all the difference.

AK: So one of the things that struck me about your advertising, and I’m curious about how you did this is, the line about how five Presidents have slept on our sheets, right?

ST: Three US Presidents, yep.

AK: There you go, US Presidents I should say, right. How did that come about? How’d you do that?

ST: Honest to goodness, they are customers. And one of them is like among our very first. He became aware of the business before we launched. And just out of respect, you know, they don’t do endorsements, I wouldn’t want to use their name. But I can tell you that more than three US Presidents use our products we just continue to say three and we, uh, we don’t give away the product, they’re customers.

One of which just literally called Missy a few days ago, um the former first lady, because she loves our towels and wanted to know if we had a recommendation on where she could get them monogrammed for their summer home. And so, you know, it was just one of those things where when you’re creating a radio ad, you’re looking for social proof and I was riffing on the mic and I was like, “You know these sheets are so great, even three US Presidents love them.” And they ended up running it in the ad and it became this hook that we became known for, which is pretty cool.

AK: It really is so memorable because, you know, so many other brands lean into the obvious in terms of the athletes and celebrities and what not. Saying three US Presidents is different and it really stays with you. And I’m sure, I don’t have any like data and maybe you do or don’t, that that is absolutely a critical component of the early days of your marketing strategy. And it happens to be true.

ST: Yeah, I mean happy accidents happen, right?

AK: Exactly. Listen, man, we can go on for hours. It’s, you know off air you said to me that you weren’t interesting, and I think that you’re one of the most interesting people I’ve spoken to and I have an enormous amount of respect for you and for your wife, Missy, and for what you’ve built and I personally am so excited to see this company continue to grow, for me to continue to use your products and for all my friends and future US Presidents and others to use these products. Just tell us, what’s the best way to follow you guys on social and find out what’s going on and what’s new and what’s happening next?

ST: Sure. So you just follow Boll and Branch on Instagram. You can follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn. Or yeah, us on Instagram is the best way to keep tabs with what we’re doing. But, we’re so appreciative of you having us and for all your support, just not just, you know, having me on the show but as a customer over the years. And hopefully, I know your son is a big fan, and hopefully maybe he’ll be the 6th US President one day that enjoys Boll and Branch sheets, you never know.

AK: I think he would love that. He was voluntold at school and now I think he’s volunsold because he loves the sheets.

ST: That’s awesome.

AK: Scott Tannen, CEO and founder of Boll and Branch, thank you again for being on Brand on Purpose.

ST: Thanks for having me.