From Startup to Success – Selling Stickers on the Internet

Full Transcript

Note: the following transcript was generated by AI and therefore may contain some errors and omissions.

It didn’t click. I just saw an image of some patches and my, you know my daughter loves using these and it helps because she’s allergic to mosquitoes. Like that’s great but very similar to all the other UGC that we might get. He’s like look at who wrote it and I was like it’s Kim Kardashian.

G’day and welcome back to the Coast and Commerce podcast. I’m Ben Amos from Innovate Media and on this show, we share inspirational stories from business leaders around the Sunshine Coast and beyond. And one of those inspirational business dudes that we’ve got here today is Gary Tramer from NatPat. Hey Gary, welcome to the show. Thank you. Thank you for having me. This is an awesome setup you’ve got here. Awesome. Well, thanks for being here in our studio for this podcast. And this is a really fascinating story in business that I wanted to share and why I wanted to bring you.

onto the show here today. So not only are you a client of ours, but, we’ve also got to know your business quite well over the, I don’t know what it’s been nearly two years or whatever. So I wanted to share that story because I think there’s a lot that people across the Sunshine Coast, if they’re in e -commerce or not, that they can learn from hopefully what you shared today. So do you want to tell us a little bit about who you are and maybe a little bit about your business journey leading up to NatPat? Let’s do it. Let’s do it.

So I only moved up to the Sunshine Coast about four years ago. And I always emphasise the point that it was before COVID. Everyone’s like, you moved up because of COVID. I don’t know. There’s like some sort of badge of honour of saying that was just before. Like we had the idea before to do something, renegade. But my business journey started and I want to sort of call out one of my co -founders, Michael, who I know you’ve met. He and I have been mates since we were three and we were hustling down the streets of Melbourne.

where we grew up pretty much since little kinder, I would say. Selling things like pop plants to our neighbours, getting lollies from the corner store and then selling them on the bus, getting the money confiscated by teachers because you’re not allowed to sell stuff at school. And that’s where the whole entrepreneurial vibe, I think, started. And we’ve been mates ever since and we’ve been hustling ever since. And NatPat is probably no different, I’m going to say.

It’s still a bit of a hustle, even though it’s a much bigger business than selling lollies on a school bus. Yeah. But Gary, can I interrupt you there? There was a, there was a photo I saw recently of you and Michael, I think it was at like your eighth or ninth birthday where you gave, you gave each other briefcases of your birthday. 13. 13. Sorry. Yeah. We’ll include that photo in the video. So if you’re watching on YouTube, it’ll be on the screen now, but.

Tell us about that. I mean, the two of you, you’ve grown up and you just had that entrepreneurial mindset from the beginning. Yeah, it’s really interesting. I mean, the briefcase is a funny thing because back in the 80s, 90s, and I’m sharing my age now, if you had a briefcase, you were a successful businessman. Yeah. Like a briefcase and a business card holder. And these are like these gangster, like silver chrome boss briefcases that we felt like we were, you know, Donald Trump, that sort of old school, you know, business vibe. Yeah.

And it was awesome. We used to walk around and the briefcases were probably half the size of us feeling, and we just had papers in there and I don’t know, code breaker books and things like that. But Michael and I, we’ve always had a, just a passion for just solving problems and doing things a little bit differently and having fun with it and trying to make money as well. And we would door knock down the neighborhood. We’d collect charity funds. We would, you know,

I can think of all the harebrained ideas that we had, you know, blowing up, I don’t know, we’d blow up cockroaches and things like that in the backyard, like a real good childhood upbringing. Absolutely. And we’ve been doing that, you know, it’s sort of graduated from those school funny little, I think, side hustles into businesses. And then NatPat is probably the most, not probably, it is the most aligned.

business that we’ve ever had in terms of our values, something that’s good for consumers, for the world, et cetera. which has been a long series of learnings to get to that point. Yeah. So tell us about now, Pat. So what is, what is the business? What is the product that you guys brought into the world? So it was a solution for ourselves. And I think if there’s any parents that are listening to the podcast, any of your listeners, you know, when you become a parent, all of a sudden you have this surge of.

well, creativity, I was going to say, but a surge of sleep deprivation and all the other things that come with it. And you go, I wish there was something that solved this because parenting in sort of Western civilization is really bloody hard and it’s very isolating. And you think, how did like a billion other people do this? And you sort of freak out. And so we had the same experience. And between Michael and I and one of our other co -founders, Andrei, we have how many?

eight kids, seven kids, something like that between us. This isn’t some weird commune thing. This is like we have separate families. But between us and you know, one of the things that we were frustrated with, especially when I moved up to the coast was mosquitoes. So my kids, they sort of fair skin, coming to the Sunshine Coast, getting absolutely ravaged by mosquitoes. Michael had the idea. We had a holiday house in Melbourne.

And this is going back a few years. And again, his kids were getting bitten by mosquitoes and he’s like, I think there’s got to be a way that we can apply repellent without having to put on repellent. Like no kids like putting on smelly sprays. No kids like, you know, putting any creams on themselves or anything like that. There’s got to be something that’s a fun way to do this. And then it was only in 2020 when sort of COVID rolled around and we just sold.

a B2B SaaS business that we had that we said, okay, what next? And it was this sort of perfect storm of, my God, I need to find a solution for the mosquitoes that we’re getting hunted or kids are getting hunted by. How do we take something that’s holistic? Because we believe in a better, less toxic thing for our kids. What’s fun? There’s a massive debate about whose idea it was. I’ll give Michael the credit.

What if we put repellent in a sticker that’s natural and that works and that kids love and that was the first product buzz patch, which is actually what we were known for before we branded into NatPat. Yeah. So it is as simple as a sticker. That’s what you ended up with. The buzz patch was our first product, which you stick on and it’s a natural insect repellent. Right. So, and then that was an instant success, I assume. Right. It was like global sensation.

Take us back to the start of BuzzPatch. So it was a shock, I will say. I mean, it was just a huge success out of the gates. But to be fair, Michael and I have been doing this sort of thing for the last 15 years. And Andrei, who’s one of the world’s best performance marketers. So I think this perfect fusion of our skills and experience knowing what would make a great business as well as what is a

a product that we would use for ourselves, that we get to test on our own kids. All those things are what helped create the success. And I think people ask me, you know, what a genius idea, how did you come up with that? It was maybe 70 % what is a problem that we can solve for ourselves, which is how we always think about a business idea. But there was a good chunk of that, which was, let’s look at the criteria that makes a good business, you know, something that has a,

a high perceived value that can be sustainable, that can ship in a relatively inexpensively, all these ingredients that we have learned before that would make it economically viable. And that’s something that we could scale globally pretty much from day one. So there was a lot of thought that went into that before we actually just said, like, let’s just do it. But yeah, within the first, I feel like the first three or four months, we started selling it online and then it just like wildfire.

Australia, the US, Canada, people from all over the world were buying it. And we thought, all right, we’re onto something. Okay. That’s cool. I was a little bit tongue in cheek when I said into global sensation, but really it was as quick as a three or four months of getting the product to market and obviously some good strategy behind that as well. and, and then you were selling globally that, that soon out of the gate. Yeah. And I think it’s funny, like people say, it was a global business. That must be really exciting. And I don’t want to be too flippant.

But for where I was sitting, which was at the time in Palmview, when we moved here in the sunny coast, Palmview forest, Global felt like just another suburb that we were sailing into. Like with the internet and running paid ads and all the strategies we were applying, it was as simple as saying, okay, let’s just add this country to where we’re showing our ads and let’s figure out how we’re gonna get product there to fulfill to customers.

And the minute we’d figure those two things out, you know, that was, that was it. That was opening a country. Yeah. Yeah. It’s crazy. So take us back to that early product development as well. So you, did you have experience from previous businesses in designing a product and getting it manufactured, that sort of stuff? Or did you have to figure that out? No, we had to figure it out. And I think one of the things that Michael and I have been quite, I think if I was to say one of our secret weapons or our superpowers is,

we’re just good at problem solving in insanely short time spans, time windows. So if somebody says we need to do X and we’ve got a day to figure this out, we’ll figure it out within an hour and we’ll actually start executing it whilst we still haven’t got all the pieces in place. And that’s, I think, one of the points. So we had no idea about repellents, we had no idea about compliance, we had no idea about manufacture, we had no idea for this particular product. And…

We just started racing, you know, it’s almost like a canvas of what do we know? What do we don’t know? And what do we not know? Everything we didn’t know. So it’s like, let’s just fill in the puzzle pieces as quickly as possible. And that comes down to no fear in cold calling, no fear in emailing, no fear in, you know, a funny story was during COVID, the Queensland Institute of Medical Research down in Brisbane,

was totally like unoccupied. Like no one was going in there because, I mean, there were staff there, but no one was going in there because of COVID. No one could fly in from Canberra or any of the other States. They had all these resources, including mosquitoes, that they were just sitting there collecting dust, not doing anything. And so I found the head researcher for mosquito disease on LinkedIn. I sent him an email. I said, I want to come down and…

test some stuff on your mosquitoes. Can we do that? And he’s like, it’s not really done. Like this is a massive organization. There’s a process in saying that we’re not really doing anything at the moment. So come on down. And we came on down with a video crew. well, it was one person, I’ll say a crew, a videographer. And we came with our test repellent, formulations that we’d had. And I said, can I go into the cage? And he’s like, the mosquito cage? Yeah. Can I go in?

It’s not really done. Like, but can we? It’s like, all right. So he unleashed like literally hundreds of mosquitoes and me wearing a lab coat. And we got the test live and like, that’s just not done. So I think a bit of hustle and a bit of luck and timing enabled us to formulate and figure it out pretty quickly. Yeah, that’s cool. I think there’s a good lesson in that for anyone in business that, you know, it might not be in your specific area, you know, but that idea of just.

You kind of make your own luck, don’t you? In a way, like they say luck, but maybe luck factors into it. But I believe that you also need to take action, right. And you need to, you need to put yourself out there and ask those questions and make those connections on LinkedIn. And you never know what, what luck is going to fall your way. Yeah, a hundred percent agree. I actually think of it like, you know, you can’t, I think of the word like magic, maybe less luck. It’s like, if you, if you over choreograph everything,

by being overly planned, having everything buttoned up, you just completely ruin the opportunity for magic to just insert itself. And it’s everywhere. And so as long as you’re following the next lead, like the next thread, let magic do its thing. And that’s luck, whatever you want to call it, universe divine intervention. But as long as you’re doing something that feels aligned and you go to that next step, so the researcher says, maybe you should call this person. I call that person. I don’t know what’s going to happen on the phone call. I have no idea the next step. But then,

magic happens and I’ve worked with this person who does this, this and this and off you go. Yeah. Yeah. I love that. So tell us about NatPat today. So BuzzPatch first product, but then you did shift the brand into just NatPat eventually. Natural Patch Company was, I guess, the parent company at the time. Yep. So take us through quickly through that expansion and what’s the company like today? Look, we were very deliberate at the start that we have

lifestyle values. And I want to be careful what I say, but we moved, I moved to the Sunshine Coast for lifestyle. We wanted to work remotely. We wanted to have a autonomous, asynchronous working style, which is basically, we don’t work nine to five, we want to have time with our kids. We want to be able to be mobile and travel. And Michael at the moment is in the US. Andrei is in New Zealand. We are all able to work with all the devices we have, etc.

We were intentional about that. And so the structure of building this business has been very strictly maintaining a low staff footprint, a tight team, everybody’s remote, there’s no central office. And doesn’t matter how big we grow, we intend to maintain that core alignment with what’s important to us deep down. So we’re not going to be pulled in a direction that doesn’t fit with our life because that’s just too important.

We’re not going to spend more time than we think is necessary. And so we actually only do the things that are the needle movers. And that’s so we could probably blow up 10 times bigger, but for what, for what benefit, you know, you’re going to die one day and it all goes to dust. So we were trying to be very, very intentional with how we run the business. What does NAPAT look like today? It’s basically very similar to how we started. It’s the three of us. It’s a collection of

amazing freelancers, contractors, a couple of agencies, maybe two or three full -time, again, freelancers. We’re in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the U S Europe. we have not just buzz patch, but we have, 12 skews and I can hear the rain coming down. Yeah. Yeah. I was just thinking, what is that noise? But if you are hearing this bit of rain happening as it’s been doing on the Sunshine Coast.

Carry on, carry. So we’re up to like 12, maybe 14 skews, which is different line items. And every time we do this, it’s an extension of what is, like, what do my kids need? I mean, that’s really as simple as it is. It’s like we had mosquito repellent and then Andrei had a baby. He’s like, my God, the sleep. It’s just killing me. Like bedtime stickers. We need one to help with that. Then, you know, my kids were going through a stage where they’re just tantruming.

a lot. And my wife Evie has essential oils with this calming remedy. How do we stick that on them? Yeah, you know, so Zen patch and then, you know, one of them gets a cold and or a cold and flu and you go to the chemist, have you got anything for like congestion because they can’t sleep? How old are they? Nothing for that. Come on, they can’t sleep. Okay, we need one for that. And so every time we’ve had a challenge with our children that we wish could be solved,

and we didn’t want to use medication or there wasn’t medication, we thought, is there a sticker for that? Next product. And then we can cock the formulation. We have some great formulators, great aromatherapists, including by far Australia’s number one renowned aroma scientist. Comes up with a formulation. I test it on our children. Then we put it into the process of safety and all the other things. Market testing and now we’re up to…

Like we’re slowly solving different parts of parenthood at different ages. And our view is, you know, we’re not going to solve parenthood. That’s, that’s its own beast. But if we can just make life a little, like take the edge off for parents with all these things where kids get the agency and they can solve their own problems with independence in a fun, playful way. Amazing. And that’s, so now where are we up to? Where we’re bringing out a range for some pets.

so dogs and cats, to help with calming anxiety ticks, and just keep having fun doing it. Yeah. Incredible. And some of the highlights as well, like if you can share some of those. So, you know, now stocked in, well, in Australia and like Anaconda stores, for example, in, in the U S in, in target, all the target stores as well. and there was a certain, there was a certain, celebrity as well.

that somehow got hold of your products. Yeah, it’s funny actually. I remember being in Melbourne away for a couple of days and I got woken at five in the morning. Michael was sending me text messages. I think I had like a hundred text messages and he’s like, my God, Shih Tzu about to get wild. It’s blowing up, et cetera, et cetera. And my eyes are waking and my initial thought was World War Three because this is at the time when,

Ukraine and I was freaking out. So the first thing I did was I went to CNN .com. I’m like, there’s no war. No major news. So I’m like, what is this blowing up thing going on? So I messaged him and I was like, what are you talking about? And he sends me an image of a screenshot of Instagram and I don’t have Instagram on my phone. It didn’t click. I just saw an image of some patches and my, you know, my daughter loves using these and it helps because she’s

allergic to mosquitoes. Mike, that’s great, but very similar to all the other UGC that we might get. He’s like, look at who wrote it. And I was like, it’s Kim Kardashian. And for whatever you think of Kim Kardashian, and my initial reaction was, that’s cool. And he messaged me he’s like, dude, you know, the Kim Kardashian. Yeah, like, you know, this is like the biggest influencer in the world that’s just said that they use our products or she uses our products and bought it.

We didn’t send samples. We don’t have an influencer program. This is completely organic. This is huge. And so then it sort of dawned on me. Like, huh. I mean, out of all the things she could use to solve the problem for her family, she chose a obscure thing that we thought not many people knew about. and it was, yeah, it was pretty humbling. Yeah. Pretty cool. Yeah. And I’ve got to ask you though, because people are probably wondering like, did that blow things up? Like, how did that impact on sales? And so it’s funny.

Because I know she charges a lot of money for a post. Let’s say it’s in the millions, I think. I don’t know. And look, I’ll qualify it by saying it’s our off season when she posted it in the US. It was like August or September. So it’s not bug season anymore. Had she done that in summer, could have been a… And the sales did double for the day. I’ll say that as well. But it was a very low base at that time. So doubling didn’t really make a difference. Where it did help was retail. You know, we had retailers saying,

Okay, who are you guys? And we’d love it helped with that story. they like knowing celebrities are involved or like the product or endorse it. and that definitely helped get into places like target in the U S yeah. Yeah. So that longer tail again, it’s kind of like, you know, you could say it’s luck, but you also had to be there, right? For that luck to happen. Yeah. But yeah, super interesting. So tell me about, you talked about your team being fairly.

diverse and global and, you know, all working asynchronously and from wherever they are around the world. You’re based here on the Sunshine Coast. I know your other co -founder, Andrei is based here on the Sunshine Coast, but then you got Michael in Melbourne as a third co -founder. What’s it, what are the challenges or what are the benefits of being based here on the Sunshine Coast for you as you’re one of the people kind of behind a global business? Many benefits.

Not many challenges. And I don’t want to play that up too much, but Michael and I had an office in Melbourne under the famous Revolver nightclub, for anyone that knows Melbourne. And we actually founded a co -working space there, or co -founded a co -working space there. And we had an office and it was an amazing environment. We had friends there, roll into the office, you know everyone. It’s just a great community. So I would say I do miss that. There was a lot of wasted time.

being in an office, you know, you’re there for a set amount of hours, you’re clearly not productive for that many hours, you go for lunches, you have coffees, and it’s fun, not overly productive. And I think when COVID for everybody made us realize you can have a different dynamic to be successful. And I also think the convergence of tools like tools like Slack, Zoom, the phone, and just different rhythms allow us to be effective.

We all work better, I think, without the distraction. So I can choose for my day when I want to be dialed in. I have the least attention span out of Michael and Andrei. And so if I can lock in for 20, 30 minutes and then go and do something else and then come back in for 20, 30 minutes, I find that that works for me. I might be more productive at 5 a So I wake up at four, go to the beach.

go for a walk, body surf, and I’ll come in and do a bit of work, get the kids ready for school, take them to school, come back, do more work. After 3 p when they come home, I’m like checked out. Like my brain wouldn’t operate. Whereas Andrei and Michael might be different. They might be more productive in that time. So we actually said, let’s make our anchors what’s important to us. For me, it’s exercise, nature, family. I know it’s the same for them as well. That’s…

prioritised first and then everything else slots in as a secondary component with whatever time we’ve got available. Some days I can put in six hours broken up throughout the day. There are some days I’ll be honest that I might only get three, three and a half, four hours contact time. I might be travelling with the kids. I might get half an hour in snippets here and there. It doesn’t slow us down. We all have trust in each other that we’re going to execute and…

We own the role, so we will get it done whatever it takes. And we’re not being judged by the hours, we’re being judged by the speed and the quality of what we put out. And it’s amazing. And I think we respect each other more because there’s no co -founder quabbles around, you know, how many hours did you put in this week? And we just know that we’re aligned and that’s the beauty of the magic of the three of us. There’s no question around commitment. It’s just, let’s all do this together the way we want to do it.

We have monthly strategy sessions, Michael, Andrei and I, we get together for 24 hours, put ourselves in a room, you know, pull out some beers or whiskey or whatever else and just ideate and hash out our biggest problems. And the rest of the team, I think are like us. They’re, most of them are parents. They have their own rhythm. They don’t want to be nine to five different parts of the world. They do their job. They do it well. They’re not there for ego. They’re not there for recognition.

They’re not there for, you know, I mean, obviously income is something they’re there for being part of the journey. and so they, they prioritize autonomy and asynchrony over, you know, culture. If I say it that way, that’s at the life stage they’re at. And we hire and gravitate people that are like that. That say, I would rather be with my family than being an office. So I’m going to reward the company by doing great work in the time that I’m allocating. And we love that. And we only have a.

15 minute all hands that happens once a week. Everyone dials in, they pre do a sheet like an update of what they’ve been working on how it relates to our quarterly goals. We read it beforehand, we ask each other questions in the 15 minutes. See you later. Next week. It’s just amazing. I love it. And I think one of the key things there is alignment, right? That’s what I’m getting from you is that because you’re clear on what’s important to you as individuals.

that then feeds through into what’s important for the company. And then you hire with that alignment in mind, you build the team around that. And I think, you know, that’s something that anyone can take away from this when they’re thinking about whether their team is in an office or whether they’re, you know, diversified around the world, then alignment’s critical. It is and you know, we’re not, we’re not a funded company. So we are accountable only to ourselves. We are equal, Michael Andrei and I equal.

you know, owners of the business, there’s no other influence in how we should or shouldn’t work. We’re not building this for money, you know, where we live on, you know, we live comfortable lives. We don’t have Ferraris, we don’t fly private jets. Even if we had billions of dollars, I think we would still live exactly the same lives as we do right now. So the question is, what for? And we do this because we love it. We’re solving a problem. We solve problems for ourselves.

We like unpacking problems, we like business. We have kids and every part of this business is aligned to our personal values first. And that’s the first check of everything and then everything else flows. So it’s not traditional and it’s definitely not the status quo. But I think if you’re gonna run a business, my view is like it is serving you versus you serving it and…

you know, a lot of people run a business and then become a slave to their own thing that they created. I’ve got to do this. I’ve got to do that. it’s killing me. Well, like, no, we’ve got very strong boundaries around what it should and shouldn’t influence. The, the tighter the boundaries, the better the output seems like the more winning we seem to have because we can only do things that are going to matter. And all the other stuff, which is fluff gets put on a parking lot and we just don’t do it. And so we’re just laser focused because of the time restraint that we put in. And that’s made.

All the difference, I think. Yeah. Yeah, that’s really cool. I mean, maybe there’s that Pareto principle there of the 80 -20, you know, is you’ve you’ve focused on because of the way that you’ve set up the company and the way that you choose to work within that, you know, potentially it forces you to focus on the, the 20 % that makes the 80 % of the results. Yeah. That’s kind of a kind of applies to Pareto principle, I think. Yeah. Right. And we live that. Yeah. Yeah. Very cool. So when you think about the success,

So far, you know, still journey to go with NatPat. What would you, what would you put that success down to? You know, is it the team like you’ve talked about and the, what were the culture and the, the way that you’ve approached that, or is it the product, the fact that you just came up with a really cool idea of putting, you know, natural oils into stickers and solving, you know, life problems through stickers, or is it more than that? Or is it something else? Well, I think, and without being too corny, I think the first thing is what is the measure of success for us?

And I think we sort of pinch ourselves every day where if I’m down at the beach or I’m in Japan like I was last week with the family and the business is progressing and I don’t feel stressed and I don’t feel financially stressed. I feel like that is by far and away the biggest success that we are enjoying the journey every day and it never feels like a chore. So that for me is like, that’s the number one on my gratitude journal every day. I think as far success as a traditional measure of.

it’s growing, it’s profitable, and I feel like we’re winning by how everybody else would measure us. I feel like my read into it is the product solves a problem, it solves it in an innovative way, and we have an exceptionally good co -founder in Andrei, who is an unbelievable marketing performance wizard, and without his contribution,

we would not be where we are. There’s no question. And I know Michael, myself and Andrei all have equal dynamics where we would say without each other, we wouldn’t be where we are. But I really feel like a combination of the product market fit out of the gates, us being the customer. So we actually are a sense check on, does this feel like it works? Would this help us? Would I buy this? That’s a big part of it. And then I think,

Having, and I’d say that the last piece for us as to why it’s been a success is maybe a bit controversial. And maybe it’s because of our experience, Michael and I, and doing this for quite a while, we moved to our own beat. And I’d say more of that is accredited to Michael’s, which is he has the most unbelievable bullshit filter and he will take on information, whether it’s packaged as advice or experience, and then he’ll apply it to his own filter and say, that’s not going to work for us.

even if it’s how it’s been done for the last hundred years, it doesn’t matter whether it’s the most successful VC, the most successful other retail brand, it doesn’t matter. We do things differently and we aren’t beholden to what’s been done before. And taking that fresh lens has been unbelievably effective for us. And there’s so many examples I could give of where somebody said, this is how you do it. And then we do it that way and it’s worked for us. And I think that approach where,

You can ask anybody for information and you can get two completely polarized opinions where they’ve both been, there are both case studies of why that would work. Raise money, don’t raise money. Have a product for retail, have a DTC only. Like there’s examples on both ends of any conversation, you know, left, right, doesn’t matter. And so at the end of the day, we’re checking in with ourselves as to what we think can work for us despite or in spite of whatever we’re told. And that’s been game changing.

Yeah, and I’ve seen that filter, that kind of, that approach to the business that filters through to the product, that filters through to the decisions you make, you know, in business. And that’s become your brand as well, I think, you know, like anyone potentially can make a competitive product to what you do. But sitting behind that is that.

that brand that you’ve built around it, which I see connects so much to what you just shared, because it’s, it is a bit out of the box. It is a bit, you know, not what you’d normally expect and that stands, stands out, you know, that creates a differentiator. So what, what role do you think that the brand has played in the success of, of NatPat to date as well? Well, I think the whole, the success of the entire business will be based on

the brand and I don’t mean brand in terms of design or packaging. I think that’s like one slice of it. I think the brand is, if we’re really honest, it’s a distillation of our own values and our own energy we put into it. I mean, when I think about the most successful pop stars or singers or artists, they are the ones that come out and you’re like, well, this is weird, like Eminem and it’s…

polarizing everybody and it’s bizarre and you shouldn’t do that. And it’s like a white guy rapping. And that is that, you know, this uncomfortability and this difference and going, I don’t care what people say, this is me. Like it’s raw and it’s me, creates brand. I think Taylor Swift does the same thing. It’s this is me unapologetically. And, you know, and so anyone that just becomes a me too, like I’m just going to make the same songs as them and try and cut through, get some success, but they don’t become noteworthy.

And I think for us, NatPat is so different. When you walk into the shelves and Target, you have many, many brands that obviously have come from the same design agency, same VC firm. It looks similar, it’s packaged similar, it’s these quirky words, it’s all cool, similar palettes. And we’re like, we don’t want to be one of the same. And we wouldn’t buy that. Let’s just be bold and different. And I think the boldness is a big part.

bold decisions, take big swings, you know, be okay when you screw it up and just keep moving forward. And that translates into everything we do. I’ve made so many mistakes and we love it because we can course correct and you know, we would rather, we have a bias for action. We would rather just do stuff and then apologize later or course correct, then try this, you know, perfect packaging and perfect this and perfect social media and speed I think is part of the game as well.

Yeah. Yeah. I love that. The word that comes to mind for me is, is remarkable. You know, like worth a brand that’s worthy of remark, you know, like something that stands out, something that’s different. And, you know, I think that if you can create a remarkable brand, right. You through that direct meaning of the word remarkable, it means that people will talk about it. People will ask, what is that sticker on your shirt? You know, what is that package on the shelf? Because it stands out.

And that’s, I think, a part of success when it comes to brands. And I think it also stems from our own experience and age and maturity is obviously a big part of it. A 20 -year -old version of me might not have been as self -assured in how we’re doing things, and we weren’t. We would read TechCrunch, look at people raising money, look at how these businesses are done, reading these blogs. And we would try and mimic that to our detriment sometimes, or most of the time.

I think in today’s day and age, kids are more self -assured than they have been. And they realize I can be, if I express myself as an individual, that’s celebrated today. And I think that is the starting genesis of becoming great in anything, but particularly in the world of business in that you look at all the great entrepreneurs, they all just move to their own beat, you know, like the Elon Musk’s and the Bill Gates and so on. It’s just, they’re quirky. You might call them weird. You might call them controversial, but…

They just do them unapologetically. I’m not going to profess that we’re anything like them, but the message is we, we, we trust ourselves and we want to do what we feel is aligned with us. And however the world takes that is how it’s going to take that. We’re not trying to please everybody or do something for everyone or, you know, but that seems to be paying dividends. Yeah. Well, it’s an awesome story. And, you know, thanks for sharing it here today as well. I think there was so much that you, you shared that.

regardless of the stage that our listeners or viewers are at in their business. Hopefully they’ll take some inspiration from that and, and march to the beat of their own drum as well, you know, and, and do that from here on the Sunshine Coast. Because I think that, you know, the world is, is a small place, you know, like you said, somewhere in that interview there that the world is just another suburb really, you know, at the end of the day and it’s all there and we can do that here from the Sunshine Coast and you guys are doing great things as well. So thanks for coming on sharing your story. Thank you for having me.

Awesome. And for you guys watching, if you’ve enjoyed this show, well, there’s more episodes of the coast and commerce podcast back in season one and coming in season two as well. So make sure you hit that follow on your, on your podcast player, hit subscribe here on YouTube and we’ll see you in the next episode.