Ellen DeGeneres 0:00
$300 to your name, so you turn it into a multi million dollar business. Listen, I had
Ellen Bennett 0:05
a big, giant, squishy goal of, I want to be in the food business. I want to do something with food. I love food. I want to cook food. I want to be next to food. I want to be near it. I knew that I needed to fix the kitchen tools, because every other brand that was out there being like, we make the best kitchen tools. I’m like, those are terrible. What are you talking about? I’m gonna make them better. We have to make them better. For our audience, most of our dreams are actually a lot harder than we think to accomplish. That’s not exclusive to me or to you, Brad, it’s like all of us have to go through the to get to the other side, or just to get to anything worthwhile.
Brad Weimert 0:45
Congrats on getting beyond a million. What got you here won’t always get you there. This is a podcast for entrepreneurs who want to reach beyond their seven figure business and scale to eight, nine and even 10 figures. I’m Brad weimert, and as the founder of easy pay direct, I have had the privilege to work with more than 30,000 businesses, allowing me to see the data behind what some of the most successful companies on the planet are doing differently. Join me each week as I dig in with experts in sales, marketing, operations, technology and wealth building, and you’ll learn some of the specific tools, tactics and strategies that are working today in those multi million eight, nine and 10 figure businesses, life can get exciting beyond a million. Ellen Bennett, I am so glad to connect with you. I appreciate you carving out the time. Oh,
Ellen Bennett 1:29
my God, happy to be here. Brad, happy new year too. Holy shit. It’s 2025 it
Brad Weimert 1:33
is 2025 and that year is going to come with a whole bunch of craziness and chaos. And I’m excited for it. Yeah, same, Michelin Star Line chef, now owner, founder of Headley and Bennett, which is an eight figure plus company that sells aprons, amongst other things. You wrote a book called Dream first, details later, how to quit overthinking and make it happen. There are a ton of questions I have for you about this. Having a massive product based company, sounds like a nightmare to me. I want to talk about all that, but a couple quick questions to kick it off, is it better to be a chef or to sell things to chefs?
Ellen Bennett 2:13
Oh, wow, I love that. I’ve never heard that one before. I I’m biased. I love cooking, and I always will love cooking, and I have this like deep urge to constantly want to go back and find a way to cook. So I’m gonna say both. I know that’s probably not what you want to hear, but I freaking love food and I love cooking. So the fact that I get to make things for the kitchen feels like I’m still cooking. I’m just like making aprons and knives and cutting boards and gear for the kitchen instead of
Brad Weimert 2:43
food? Well, that’s a great answer for you. I mean, ideally for everybody, they actually love what they’re doing. But I love hearing that, yeah,
Ellen Bennett 2:49
but as we were saying offline here, it’s like you were saying some things are really hard, and it’s harder than you thought, and most of our dreams are actually a lot harder than we think to accomplish, and that’s just that’s not exclusive to me or to you, Brad. It’s like all of us have to go through the shit to get to the other side or just to get to anything worthwhile. You gotta go through the juicy, ugly parts. Yeah,
Brad Weimert 3:16
I agree, and I think that it’s important to realize that the bumps in the road are the road itself, and that you never really know what you don’t know until you get into it is a huge part of the journey. Did you see there in
Ellen Bennett 3:34
my book, there’s a page that says they’re not bumps in the road, they are the road. I literally quote that saying because it’s so true. If you don’t know that it’s coming, it bums you out when it arrives. But if I know that things are gonna get hard, I’m like, Okay, well, there it is. There’s the like, Dragon in this level. I know there’s gonna be two dragons in the next level. It’s like Super Mario Brothers. And you just gotta, like, you know, get get rough.
Brad Weimert 4:03
And yes, that that quote was directly stolen from your for this purpose. Perfect Michelin star rating system worth paying attention to, or totally subjective shit.
Ellen Bennett 4:13
No, I actually think it’s really valid. It’s listen with anything you got to put yourself on their radar. But man, does the team that I used to work for go above and beyond every single day, and they’ve been there for 20 years. Like, to get a Michelin star is no joke. You can’t just, like, pay to play. This is not meta, okay? It’s like, you gotta put in the time, and you have to be constantly innovating, and people lose their stars, and it like ruins their career. I mean, it’s, it’s a big deal. It’s a very big deal. So, yes, valid.
Brad Weimert 4:44
Do you think that you can tell them that 11 Madison should not have Michelin stars anymore?
Ellen Bennett 4:50
Well, to their credit, they’re pulling off miracles with vegetables. Whether you’re a fan of a vegetable or not. It’s kind of like the Kardash. She ends you can hate them or you can love them, but you gotta respect them, because they’ve done some amazing stuff that lots of people with lots of money haven’t been able to do. So you gotta just respect the vegetable. Respect the Kardashians.
Brad Weimert 5:16
I’ll give them points for design, but I’ve got beef with them. Pun intended. What’s the most underrated kitchen tool for you? Ooh,
Ellen Bennett 5:28
gosh, an offset spatula. Do you know what that is? Yeah, it’s like this little skinny spatula that has a slight tilt to it, and you can use it to flatten things out, scoop things up, flip something like it’s just a little piece of metal that’s got some buoyancy to it, so it’s a little bit of an all purposer, and you can and it’s not big to carries. You just have it stashed around. It’s like a precision tool. Real nerdy, real nerdy. What’s
Brad Weimert 5:58
the most underrated activity for someone running a multi million dollar e commerce Store,
Ellen Bennett 6:02
you can do your cryo chambers. You could do your freaking whatever, all the saunas. But if you’re not sleeping like God, help you. You gotta sleep because it’s the it’s the bones to the whole operation. You need it. And I need it. I have two kids, and I’m nursing a one baby, and I have the company, and I have the TV show, like, if I don’t sleep, everything falls apart.
Brad Weimert 6:29
Yeah, I was, I was writing this morning, and I didn’t have a ton of time, but I I always try to get a little something done when I don’t have a lot of time to kind of keep the habit going. But anyway, I was reflecting on how I’ve been spending a lot of time focusing on the goal and then altering my state to try to help me hit the goal. So if I need to do a ton of work, you know, caffeinating, or if I need to socialize and connect with people having a drink to relax, or what a series of other things. And I need to move in the direction, or move back to the direction of focusing on my state, so that I am living in a way where I can show up the best way possible for the goal. Oh yeah.
Ellen Bennett 7:20
So true. Like, yeah, don’t just sort of fix the problem, like, get to the crux of it and resolve the base proactively. I think that’s, that’s what sleep does for me. I’m like, yeah, so much goes wrong when I don’t sleep. I’m in a bad mood. I don’t make good decisions. I might be sleepy while I’m driving. Like, things get dangerous because I’m literally on the road, like, eyes closing, you know, it’s not good. So, yeah, you just kind of have to go back to basics. So much of stuff is just, like discipline in the basics. It’s so annoying. We want to find all these, like hacks. It’s like, well, if you just brushed your teeth, you wouldn’t have gotten this stupid cavity.
Brad Weimert 7:59
Yeah, that’s consistently annoying to me, too. I think that there are a ton of boring things in life that are really important, or it is the boring things that are going to yield the result. Warren
Ellen Bennett 8:13
Buffett, hello, he says, put it in the boring stuff. I’ll tell you something I did a while ago. I got a little bit of money in my pocket, and I was like, oh my god, I’m gonna go out and I’m gonna invest. And I started, like, throwing money at all this random shit that I didn’t know anything about. I wasn’t an expert in, I knew nobody that was an expert in, but I just found it sexy and cool and interesting. And guess what happened to that money? Poof, it went away. And the money that I took, and I just, like, put into real estate and stock market through some very, like, standardized, you know, Fidel, I’m at UBS, but, like, I just put it there every year. It’s like, 15% growth, compounding year over year over year over year. And the real estate doing awesome, but it was the the sexy, shiny, I want a hit of something immediately that’s going to give me a result within six months to a year. None of it panned out. And everyone was like, running towards it like it was the hottest thing since sliced bread. And they’re like, you have to invest in this business. It’s so cool. It all of it went away. And so it was lesson. And just like longevity play the
Brad Weimert 9:23
law, I want to talk about that, and I want to talk to you about that specifically as it pertains to product development and the role of products. But before we get to that, you went to culinary school in Mexico City, and then you came back and you got a job as a line chef for a two Michelin star restaurant. One day, the head chef says that they need to order aprons for the restaurant, at which point you tell them that you have an apron company, which you do not and this is how Hedley and Bennett started and you launched the company. From that moment. Why? Why did you do that? You had it sounds like you were planning on being a chef, and you went this divergent path to launch an apron company. I think that it’s I want to fast forward to today in the things that you’re doing today to drive the company, because the beast of a company now. But before we do that, I think that it’s important to look at kind of these Divergent Paths. Whether you are brand new and getting started in business, or you’re established and you’re thinking about the next move, this decision making process is super relevant. Yeah, 100%
Ellen Bennett 10:34
listen, I had a big, giant, squishy goal of, I want to be in the food business. I want to be in food. I want to do something with food. I love food. I want to cook food. I want to be next to food. I want to be near it, right? That was the goal. And I think it’s okay to have big, squishy, at least, like a North Star goal, and then you take a lot of steps to get to that place, and you don’t know, like, which way the path is going to take you. For me, it was being in Mexico, going to school, going to that Michelin star restaurant, working there. And then in that journey, I also realized, oh shit, this is really hard work. Also, I don’t know that I love this as my core, core work forever. Maybe I don’t want to have a restaurant. But if I hadn’t gone down that path, if I had, let’s say, started a restaurant before working at another one, I would have been in debt and time wasted, etc. So I was really happy that I actually plunged in and worked there first, and then while being there, I realized our uniform sucked, everything, everybody, everything about the experience was terrible, and I wanted to make it better. And so I was like, I want to be Nike of the culinary world. I want gear that looks legit and real and proper. And I’m sure when you maybe first heard of us, you were like an apron company, like you sort of have this tone of that sounds cute little flirt, like frilly, and that’s not what we’re doing. And that was never what I stood for. To me, it was about, like, dignity and pride in the kitchen and then making gear around it that was super legit. So I really went hardcore for gender neutral, beautiful colors, great design. But on top of everything, like hardcore quality, and I developed every single thing with chefs. So nothing was ever like in my head, in a room somewhere, I was always sitting down with the person that was going to use it, myself included, and developing the product. So it was for the person using it. It wasn’t invented. And then hope they use it. It was what they needed and wanted, and that has been the the secret to our success forever, because now that the brand is not an apron company anymore, we’re we call ourselves a culinary brand, and we have knife tools. We have knives, we have kitchen tools. We have all these knife tools. Did I just say knife tools? Yes, I did. I did have a child nine months ago. So bear with me. But our kitchen tools, our knives, our cutting boards, our aprons, like every single thing has been done with chefs out in the community,
Brad Weimert 13:11
you sell a lot of stuff now, but you did start as an apron company, which sounds super strange, I think, to probably most entrepreneurs, they’re like that seems like not an ideal market to target, having a strange one off singular product. But today, you’ve been in, you are in 1000s of restaurants. You’ve sold a million plus aprons, and now you’ve got all these other product lines. Can you give me an idea of the basic profile of the size of the company today? We know you’re eight figures plus. But what’s the head count? And how do you how do you track growth? Otherwise, here’s
Ellen Bennett 13:44
the funny thing. When I first started, my goal was, oh my god, we’re going to have 200 plus employees. This is going to be awesome. It’s going to be huge. And as the company grew and progressed and evolved, we went from doing everything ourselves, like I have a 16,000 square foot factory in downtown LA where we used to manufacture literally every single product to now we outsource our customer service to the most amazing team. We outsource pieces of our finances. We have found that we don’t need to pretend like we’re good at everything, and we can actually focus on doing what we do really well, which is building community, building product, building our brand. Everything else can be outsourced. There are things we only we can do, and that’s what we need to focus on. So while I used to do manufacturing, we don’t anymore. While I used to do the customer service, now we oversee it. So our head count went from in my mind, you know, 200 plus, to the less the better. And so we’re about 30 plus people give or and I would like to, I like to keep it tight, and I think it’s better because we run a much more efficient team. There aren’t layers of layers of layers. And you. You know, just the complexity of a bigger team starts to get a little intense, and so we’ve just found more growth in tighter, more nimble teams. I
Brad Weimert 15:10
love that, and I think that, and I heard a little bit of it with you, and so you can correct me if I’m wrong, but I respond to that question when people say, what’s your head count? Or how many people I’m like, as few as possible. Like, I less humans the better, right? Give me robots to fix things and make things happen. And don’t get me wrong, like, I want, I want the people that I’m working with to win. I want everybody to win. And also, humans are the weakest link in the exchange. So, like, if we can get it to people that are full blown experts in their status, it makes the operation easier, but human systems are the most complicated thing you can have, which, by the way, is why restaurants freak me out from an ownership or management perspective. And I And when I’m asked that, I kind of get a little defensive inside. I’m like, you know, I feel like, No, I’m
Ellen Bennett 15:56
so proud of it, honestly. And I think it’s a it’s a big learning curve for an entrepreneur, because you think it becomes a vanity number a little bit you’re like, Oh, well, I have 80 employees. Well, that doesn’t mean that you have EBITDA. That doesn’t mean that you’re putting money to the bottom line every month. Like, what does it mean? It just means you’re spending a lot of money. Do you need to be spending all that money? Or are there pieces of your company that you can actually outsource. And to me, I had this like, Aha, epiphany through COVID, actually, where there were parts of the company. I was just like, why are we trying to be our own distribution center and manufacturing and, and, and, and so we went out and started finding talking other founders and a friend of mine. Her mother actually does our customer service company, and she happens to also do it for 20 other huge direct to consumer businesses that are crushing it. So it’s not just like, Oh, my mom’s friend that does CX. It’s like a serious company. And so the point of that story is like your network has a ton of little resources that if you ask around, you’ll find ways to outsource. And guess what? Every time when the holidays come around, we can scale up and we can scale down, and come January and February, you’re not having to lay anybody off. You just simply adapt to what you need at the time and be nimble and spend less money. You don’t need to have a high head count to feel good about
Brad Weimert 17:21
yourself. Yep, I love that. What’s the what’s the split of product sales, direct to consumer versus B to B?
Ellen Bennett 17:30
So crazy. We used to be 100% B to B, right? Like, that’s how the business started, bespoke, one off, B to B. Sales to restaurants, completely B to B business. So now we are 80% direct to consumer and 20% B to B, which is nuts, because that jump from B to B to D to C was like Herculean and starting almost a whole new company, because your whole framework changes the way you scale everything. It was a journey. I have the gray hairs and the war wounds to prove it, but yeah, that’s that’s what our current split is. And in that 20% B to B, it’s everything encompassing like restaurant sales, hotel sales, corporate sales, even, like, I don’t know, an agency calls us and they say, We want 100 aprons for some other company like Rolex, and we’ll make them aprons with our logo and our brand and also the Rolex brand on the apron.
Brad Weimert 18:34
Yeah, I love that. I mean, it’s there’s no question, running an E com store is a totally different skill set entirely. It’s a completely different business model. Does the B to B come from the E com store, or do you have a dedicated sales effort towards B to B?
Ellen Bennett 18:50
Yeah, we have a sales team, and we’ve always had a sales team, and I think for us, it’s been a little bit of a secret weapon. When I started the company, I didn’t have any outside capital or investors. I literally started it with $300 out of my house, and I had my first order, and that was, you could call that our seed money. I got a deposit, and I had to turn it in, and I had, it was 40 aprons. So I think I got paid, like, I don’t know, 40 an apron or something like that. And I just reinvested every penny back into the company. And then if I could make 10 aprons, and then I sold 15, and then I’d make 20. And I just went, like, this, dude, little, a tiny, a bunch of tiny, little steps. And little by little, it grew and grew and grew until it got to a place where I was like, okay, we can start to invest in bigger projects and bigger things, but I think it’s important to remember the core things that helped you get successful and hold on to some of those nuggets, and then in the long run, you realize you can’t keep doing that anymore. I couldn’t keep making perfectly bespoke aprons for everyone and their mother that walked in because I would get a. Call, let’s just say the Obamas, Gordon Ramsay, oh, my God, He wants one apron. You need to turn it around in two days, and we would drop everything and make that apron. And for a long time, it was awesome, because it was building street cred and it was building relationships and community. But it got to a place where I recognized like that is not scaling a company. And I learned the little magical word Tam, and I was like, oh, total addressable market. There’s so much more out there than just outfitting chefs. What about home cooks? What about all those people at home that are hardcore? I want to service them too. And so my world just started getting bigger and bigger and bigger. I
Brad Weimert 20:43
think there’s also a question of where the focus of the CEO goes. I had years ago. Do you know who Dave Asprey is? No, who’s that? Dave started bulletproof coffee. Oh, amazing. He’s like an OG bio hacker guy, but he’s a buddy. We were at Burning Man together, and he’s a crazy person in the best way ever and other ways. But when I first met him, we I was interacting with him, and I was talking, I mean, I was basically trying to sell credit card processing, the bulletproof, easy Peter X credit card processing company, and he responded with like, a one sentence email, and he was like, I’m the CEO. This is not my decision to make and talk to my team. And this was, I mean, almost 10 years ago at this point, but the lesson was really good, which was, depending on the scale where you are as the CEO, you have to pick the things that you can focus on, because your attention is the most important thing that you have. So that idea of like, drop it for Gordon Ramsay or whoever, it’s really important to be able to make that shift. What size were you at when you shifted from the core focus of B to B to in bespoke to D to C,
Ellen Bennett 22:01
oh, we were just a few million, like we were small. And it, it was, when I say Herculean lift, it was a Herculean lift to make that leap, because you got to think about it from a psychological standpoint as a company, you’re operating very differently, right? So you have to change the way everything works, and you have to commit to being a big kid. You cannot pretend like you can, just like, cobble it together and tape it together the way that we had. We had to really upgrade our systems. We had to get an ERP system. We needed to really, you know, streamline our finances, improve our supply chain, make sure we had the right inventory, we had the right inventory planning. Because when you do bespoke one off, you don’t really have to plan for inventory, because it’s just making it as it comes, which is a gift in so many ways. That’s how I was able to bootstrap the company for a long time. But through those years, called the first eight years, all that bootstrapping, all that community building, it built the foundation, but it was it was thin, but it was sturdy. And it was time. It was like, Am I just going to keep building this strong, skinny little foundation forever? Or do I want to go to this next chapter? And I had to have a personal come to Jesus where I committed to jumping and making that leap and saying, This is not just going to be like a little mom and pop business. This is actually going to become a proper, true Corporation, but that has a soul, and making sure that I maintain the integrity and soul of the company as it continues to grow, because that was really important to me. I poured so much of my own heart and soul into making this thing not just be like shit we’re selling on the internet like it meant something to people, and I didn’t want to lose that because we were getting bigger. I just knew that by getting bigger, we’d have more impact. If you have more resources, you can have more effect on the world. And that was, that was the goal. It was like, Okay, you want to get bigger. Why I want to get bigger? Because I want to have more product. I want to be able to, like, tackle the whole kitchen and make everything pro grade and through the lens of a chef. And nobody is doing that. Everybody’s got, like, beautiful marketing, shitty product or terribly looking market, terrible looking marketing and, like, good product, but for B to B, and I felt like we had the opportunity to come out there into the world and say, Hey, we’ve been here, buying, paying our dues and, like, putting in the time. And now we’re going to bring you the pro gear that we sell to chefs and that we’ve been selling for a decade, but we’re gonna bring it to your home. Stop buying random shit at the store. I’m not gonna name names, but like we all know, there’s plenty of stores out there that are just selling you stuff that doesn’t really work, or there are ads out there that are selling you things that look pretty, and then it starts peeling, it starts falling apart. That is not us, like we. Our quality through and through. So I feel very proud of how we went through this, like, really thoughtful jump.
Brad Weimert 25:07
How big were you when you decided that you should sell more than aprons? We were
Ellen Bennett 25:12
still pretty small. Again, a few million. It was in that few million range, like it was a hard to me. I think when a company is under 5 million, it’s so difficult, because you need resources of a business that’s bigger than five, but you can only afford resources of a business that’s under five, so you have to, kind of like, cobble it together and get really creative to make that, you know, leap. I think, obviously we’re much larger now, but back then, being at that scale was maybe the hardest stage we’ve ever been at. For me, it was the hardest stage that I had ever been at as the CEO. I’m not the CEO anymore. I’m now the Chief Brand Officer, and I sit on our board, but that was part of the journey of growing and scaling. It was like, Okay, we’re going to this next phase. Do you want to be the person that leads this next phase, or do you feel like your skill set is best in other places in the company? And I felt that I was the chief evangelist. I was the product driver, and being buried in ops and supply chain was maybe not the best use of my time, so I chose to find somebody that could take on that role and be the science and then I could be the art.
Brad Weimert 26:29
Wow. How do you How did you reconcile growing your passion project and letting go of control of how it was built. Oh,
Ellen Bennett 26:41
it’s a journey. It’s a brutal journey. I think I’m still, I’m still reconciling with it. You know, there’s, there’s so much goodness that has come from these decisions, and there’s so much challenge too. And that’s just kind of like the way it is a dream, is a dream, and then it starts coming to life, and then you realize, damn, there’s a lot of hardship that comes with my dream, and that’s okay, because it’s just like part of the journey back to the bumps in the road, right? And as long as the benefits outweigh the harm, I’m like, Alright, this is still the right decision. That’s kind of like, how I weigh it. It’s like, is it creating greater good or worse, good, like it’s how much is happening in the good department, and should I keep doing that or not? And it’s still good, so it’s better than if I was running it. So therefore I feel like it’s still the right decision. One
Brad Weimert 27:34
of the things that I somebody told me a long time ago now I regurgitate as if it’s my own is as an employee, it makes sense that you look out for yourself first, and then you take care of the team after yourself, and then you think about the company, as the founder of the company. I have to protect the company first, even if it’s my own detriment in the short run, so that it can take care of the team, so that it can take care of me individually. Yep, making a transition from the CEO, founder of the company, to the Chief Brand Officer and a board member, and then giving away the ability to make decisions about where the company’s going to the new CEO sounds like a potentially beneficial for the company thing, but tremendously challenging individually. What was the hardest part about letting go of the CEO title? It wasn’t
Ellen Bennett 28:29
the letting go of the title. I don’t actually have much. I don’t know. I don’t put too much weight on it. I’m like, it’s a title I created the company that’s incredibly valuable. And I think that that’s like, that speaks for itself. And I don’t need to pat myself on the back by calling myself the CEO. I think the hard part is when really big decisions, you know, when people don’t align on really big decisions, and you’re caught in the crossfire of, like, I’m not running the show, but I’m still on the bus, and so it’s like, when you’re driving around the curves and you’re like, oh, I don’t know if we should make that call there, right? But I’m actually like, at peace with it, because I know that as long as I stay true to the role that I’ve taken on, which is Chief Brand Officer, and I make sure that we are staying true to the vision of the business, which is become a culinary brand, right? That is pro grade, through the lens of a chef for the home and the professional like as long as I ensure that that keeps happening, even if the little minutia is not going exactly how I want it, it’s okay. We just need to be still pointing in the right direction. So my my psychosis, if you will, of like, controlling every detail has gone from like, tiny to more. This is like a wider lane. I’m just like, Okay, we still just need to be pointed in the right direction. And I ensure that that pulse is still there. And that’s, that’s my role. It’s not to, it isn’t to manage. To the supply chain and other things, and to your analogy earlier, I feel like, after I had my second child and my first frankly, I let go of the CEO title at my first kid. And it’s a funny thing, right? Like a woman has to do that men wouldn’t, but I had to choose, do I put my energy and effort towards my children, or do I put it towards supply chain? I can keep working on supply chain, but frankly, it’s just not that important compared to like my new child. So to me, prioritizing myself for the first time in 11 years was like a revelation, and it was really crazy to do that, and I felt guilty about it, but I knew in the long run, it was the right thing, so I sacrificed myself a little, but in the long run, benefited, because I got to spend that time with my kid that I’ll never get back later, right? So no one’s gonna give that to me. I It was my window, and I got it. And then when I had my second kid, I was like, You know what? I still don’t want to go and deal with supply chain. I’m going to continue with this, and I’m going to make sure that I have the time, the energy to take care of myself, but also the business, but in a different way, not in the day to day, but in the at large. And that’s been a freaking journey. I say to you very like consolidated but high highs and low lows
Brad Weimert 31:26
I can only imagine. Yeah, so you went from selling dope aprons to selling dope kitchen stuff. How do you think about the product roadmap and when to introduce a new product at this point, and when to just keep doing what you’re doing and focus on selling the stuff that you know is good and that you have and that
Ellen Bennett 31:52
works? I get hyped up and excited and frustrated when I look out on the market and the landscape and see things that are just like, not well done. And I as a background to me, I’m I’m half Mexican, half English, my entire English side of my life, my dad, my aunt, my grandma, my grandma, like, literally, they’re all engineers. Every damn one of them is a freaking engineer, either, oh, like, rocket engineer, literally for rockets, or a mechanical engineer, or just engineers and so super nerdy, right? And then on the left side of my life, it’s my Mexican, colorful, vibrant, loud, vivacious energy. And so I’m like, a smash up of these two worlds, and I always have been. And so to me, I’m just like, constantly trying to figure out how to make shit better. I can’t just, like, see the pen and be like, happy with the pen. I have to look at the pen and think about, oh, that color. I want it to be a better color. And I’m psychoanalyzing how I can improve the grip and the this and the that. And so it’s just like, it’s wired in me to never just take something for what it is. So I could never just settle and doing aprons, because I did that for nine years, and I perfected it, and they’re really freaking good. And whoever’s listening to this interview, you gotta go look at them. Okay, it’s not just an apron, like we literally outfit every single person on Top Chef. It’s the official apron. If you ever watch Food Network, it’s the official apron like it’s the apron that everyone and their mother that’s worth their salt in the kitchen space wears. It has a little red patch on the chest that is a heavily amounted apron. So I knew that I needed to fix the kitchen tools, because every other brand that was out there being like, we make the best kitchen tools. I’m like, those are terrible. What are you talking about? I’m going to make them better. We have to make them better for our audience. And so that’s what it was. It was just like people come showing up to the party and being like, oh, we’ll make this thing. And I just, I’m calling bullshit on all of it, and I’m saying no, Headley and Bennett actually has the right to make the best one, because we’ve already been putting in the time. So here is the best kitchen tool you’ve ever, you’re, you’re ever going to use, and we just launched them. You have to Read our Fast Company article. It’s like a six minute read. Not too crazy, breaks down how, why, and what we did to develop those kitchen tools. You could essentially dump your entire kitchen drawer out and replace it with ours and never have to buy anything again. It’s like the essentials. And every single one was developed with a chef like we nerd it out. Nothing is private, labeled. Everything has been designed, soup to nuts. Tooling, we spent so much money tooling, fucking whisks and spatulas and labels and all kinds of stuff. So
Brad Weimert 34:42
that brings up an interesting question, because we live in a world today where it is easier and easier and easier to outsource the development of products to a third party, and now there’s this huge spectrum of just white label or literally sit in your garage. Hand carve them yourself, and and everything and everything in between, right? So I guess the the core question here is, How involved are you in the actual creation? Because you, you told me a minute ago that you wanted to put the expertise into third parties whenever possible, so that you didn’t have the things in house that you weren’t experts at. So what part of the product development Do you have a manufacturing company make? And what do you actually do yourself? And how does that process work? Oh,
Ellen Bennett 35:31
such a good question. So we have team members that are industrial designers to some degree, but we don’t have 3d printing machines, for example. So we will develop the base core of like, what we want, and then we will hire external industrial designers to perfect and sculpt and get all the angles just right. And we’ll work with them, but it’s a very collaborative effort, so we’ll take chef feedback, we’ll give it to them, we’ll come back again, we’ll print it, we’ll put it in chef’s hands. We’ll go back to the like, it’s a lot of collaborative effort. And eventually we get to a place where we’re like, Okay, this is good. So then we make a metal sample, and that is the first layer of the tooling process, and it’s just like one singular item. And then from there, we perfect that one. And then it goes to the official tooling moment, which is where they make these like frames and create it so that you can pour the mold in and make the shape that you want. But that’s the long, expensive, painful road to create product. Most people like you’re saying can go on to Alibaba and be like, spatula, slap your logo on it, call it a day. But to me, You’re that is cutting corners. You’re just Who’s your competition, Amazon, like you’re just competing with the world when you’re doing that for us, our story and our differentiators are the chefs we’re working with, the quality the material, the fact that it’s gonna last forever. Like, if you buy a neighborhood from us, you will have that thing for forever, 1213, years. Like, it is bulletproof, and we make them in such beautiful materials, they last forever. We couldn’t go out and make a kitchen tool that didn’t stand up to that same level of like quality. So it’s just quality, quality, quality. It always comes back to that. And I’m passionate about it, like I actually, I’m telling you this, and I and I mean it, I care about it. It’s not just like for marketing purposes, right?
Brad Weimert 37:38
But it does create a hell of a narrative for marketing, for marketing purposes,
Ellen Bennett 37:42
it does, but it’s like a, it’s like a great byproduct, if you’re doing it just for marketing, not for the purpose of making a great product. You’re kind of like missing the you’re missing the the mark. There a little, yeah.
Brad Weimert 37:56
Well, speaking of that, you brought up the the beast. You brought up Amazon. You have an Amazon store. What percentage of sales go through Amazon versus your own website?
Ellen Bennett 38:10
Oh, very small. And we actually keep it. We don’t have the full selection on Amazon either, so it’s just a small little selection for the people that feel they need to buy through Amazon, by the way, like a hardcore Amazon user, you know, like, here we go all day long. Or how can we not be at the center? I know it’s just so convenient. So because of that, we said, okay, let’s allow, you know, that convenience to benefit our customers, but we’re not going to have the entire, you know, soup over there. So some things are on there, but not everything. So
Brad Weimert 38:45
I think, I think what I heard was you have an Amazon store with super limited inventory and products that people can find you there as a search engine and then jump over to your eCom store bingo. Love that that’s well played. While we’re talking about strategic decisions to drive traffic, how do you get people to the website? What are your main channels for traffic at this point?
Ellen Bennett 39:08
Well, we are definitely playing the meta game hard and deep. We definitely we have that is an agency, and we have a team internally, so we work side by side in partnership with people that really know what they’re doing and can help guide us, but then our team internally is like, on it, like we’re on it, and we have been doing it that way for quite some time, and we tried to do everything in house for a while, and it was not as effective. So we’ve gone back and forth, and now we’re at a place where it’s like, okay, we can do this a little bit of a hybrid model, if you will. So a lot of the a lot of the effort goes towards that, and then I would call ourselves an omnichannel business now, like we are not just online, we’re B to B, and we also are starting to inch our way into. Retail. So we have some presence in places like Ace Hardware there. William Sonoma is rolling out this year. We’re going to be in, we’re in Macy’s and, gosh, where else, like anthropology, The Container Store. So we’re starting to enter that, that world. But we’re doing it very like cautiously, because that world seems to be like quicksand, falling apart. And like, What’s your thought on retail? I think
Brad Weimert 40:33
just like rolling into e com, rolling into retail is a whole different business model. I mean, it’s entirely right, and so you can look at it as a distribution channel, and certainly at some size and scope, it’s a distribution channel, but the mechanics of making that work, the sales process there, all totally different. So I would imagine there’s a hell of a learning curve,
Ellen Bennett 40:54
yeah, which is why we’re taking our sweet, sweet time to do it. It’s like B to B is this amazing gift for us, because it keeps our street cred, it keeps us honest. Chefs continue to give us feedback, and it creates great cash flow, right? It’s just like, good margin, really awesome business. Then you have E com that becomes the amplification. It’s like, we can go for so many more people out there in the world, and then retail is for the ones that want to touch it and feel it in person. Will we ever get in mortar? Probably not, but we’re not even in Canada yet. Like, we have a lot to go after. We have a lot of places to to tackle, which is really exciting for us as a company. Again, we’ve been, like, focused deeper than just outward, and I think that’s been benefiting us.
Brad Weimert 41:45
Yeah, I think, I mean, the idea of not being in Canada yet is great. One of the most common mistakes that early stage companies make is to go really wide, really fast, and it’s very normal to see somebody that just started in is sub 1 million or a couple million, not be able to clearly articulate who their ideal client is, and their answer is something like, Well, anybody that cooks, and that leaves them in a position where they’re trying to sell to everybody instead of getting very good at Selling to one person.
Ellen Bennett 42:20
Totally, totally, yeah. I mean, we do remember Steven Allen. The shirts was a New York brand been around forever. He did colored shirts for like 15 years, and he built his name off of these button ups for men, and then he branched out into all these other things. But he said, like his success was anchored on those shirts, because everyone got to know him because of that, and it helped him stay simple as a brand and as a business. I think in so many ways, that’s what Headley and Bennett did. It’s like our apron became our business card, and everybody knew that little red ampersand, and it was out there in the world. And if you scroll through Tiktok or Instagram, you see it, and it becomes, it becomes like a bit of a trust thing. And now that we’re getting these other things, it’s like we’re tacking them on. But it’s been a it’s been a slow, thoughtful journey, and I think that the the party is over when it comes to raising 50, 7080, $100 million to hope that you build a brand, it’s like, no, you actually need to be profitable, and you actually need to do it in a way that works, because no one’s just going to give you money anymore the way that they used to, so
Brad Weimert 43:32
I’m told. But I’m with you in the stick in the lane that you are comfortable with and understand from an investing perspective. And some of those investors do, and some don’t. In any event, you mentioned that you were super big on meta, and I think that I really hate that they rebranded as meta. It’s just fundamentally confusing. I don’t like talking about it that way, but you mean Facebook and Insta and WhatsApp, maybe. But if you’re in the US, probably just Facebook and Insta. You have a social brand for the company, for Headley Bennett, and also a social brand for yourself. How do you prioritize spending time on your personal brand versus the Headley and Bennett brand when you think about social so
Ellen Bennett 44:14
where I am in my journey of being the Chief Brand Officer, I prioritize my brand, but I prioritize making content for both, if that makes sense. So I make the content for my Instagram, but I am constantly finding ways to collab, post, use creators that we’ve collaborated with on product to make videos and then post it on both accounts to continue to you know what, as I keep mentioning, like, maintain the soul and the integrity of the business like, I don’t want us to just be thought of as a corporation, like I want us to be thought of as this is beloved brand, and we have so much good will that we worked so hard to build over all these years by showing up again and again and again for our. People, I don’t want to lose that. So I think by having my separate channel, I have this show called Kitchen glow up, right? And I’m about to start shooting season two. And essentially the the premise of it is, I go into people’s home kitchens and redesign it through the lens of a chef. That is like, it’s essentially the heavenly mission the opening act of the entire show is like a 32nd Headley and Bennett commercial. So to me, it’s the best amplification of what we do to millions and millions of people, and it’s organic traffic, right? And so I think of myself as the organic brand building bucket, and then our team is the pay to play dollars driving bucket. And if you have both, it’s a little bit of what I mentioned, the art and the science. There’s soul, and then there’s also amplification by ad dollars.
Brad Weimert 45:54
I love that. That’s well thought up. What do you think the worst mistake is that people make when they are trying to leverage their personal brand for business building,
Ellen Bennett 46:04
I think you can’t you can’t fake it. You can’t fake the brand building. Like, there’s got to be truth to whatever you are. We all have our own version of special sauce, right? Like, what is your thing and what is your magic that you bring to the world? That’s what you have to identify, first and foremost. And then from there, you can start trying things out to see what works for you. For me, I’ve been on this journey of like, okay, I used to be the apron lady on Instagram. That was literally my handle, the apron lady. And I went through this evolution where I was like, You know what? You’re more than an apron lady, like, there’s more to you than that. Who are you? And I was like, Okay, I’m Ellen Marie Bennett, and I took on my middle name, which is a little bit more Latin than Ellen Bennett, and I became Ellen Marie Bennett on Instagram. And that might sound so basic, but it’s actually an important part of my personal brand journey, because I owned my roots, I owned my Latin heritage for for like, for real. And I also owned myself as an entity outside of my company. And that was a big, big step. I am not Headley and Bennett Hedley invented is not me. We are, you know, swimming like this together all day long, and I built the brand, and I am the soul of the business, but separately, I am my own individual. And once I did that, I wrote the book Dream first, details later, and that was like my first kind of like throw into the pond of personal brand. But I did it with the mission of driving more traffic to Headley and Bennett, because I wanted people to know the story behind this company that they wear all day long, like, who made it? How did she build it? Why did she build it? And then showing people how they can make their own dreams come true by just getting on the fucking road and starting right. Like, I had $300 I had no plan, and I did it. You could do it too. So it’s been this like evolution of splitting the name, opening my own Instagram account, starting to do videos, doing them very terribly, getting better at them, putting in the reps and just practicing and landing things that I don’t know. Speaking at Shake Shack, for example, I spoke at the it was like a manager summit. The year after COVID kind of ended, it was a big deal. The CEO of Shake Shack called me, we outfit Shake Shack, and he was like, I’d like to hire you to come and speak at our manager Summit. There’s going to be, like, 700 people there. Can you do it? And I was like, yes, yes, I can. And I absolutely crushed it. I hired a coach. I did a whole thing, but it was like, really out of my comfort zone. I had never done anything like that. I had done it small scale, but it became a piece of the pie. It was like author, speaker, mother, entrepreneur, like I was tacking on these little titles and saying, Yes, I can not, no, I can’t, or I’m not worth it, or I’m not tall enough, or I’m not skinny enough, or whatever it was, I was just like, No, you can do this and and it takes courage to say, I can do this, and then you start doing it.
Brad Weimert 49:18
That’s awesome. Ellen, thank you so much. It’s been great talking to you. That’s a wrap for today’s episode. Please subscribe and most importantly, leave us a review. It takes like 30 seconds, and it makes such a big impact. It helps other people find us. Also. You might not know this, you can watch over 100 episodes of beyond a million with guests like Grant Cardone, Wes Watson and Neil Patel at beyond a million.com.