Ep 10: The Power of Personal Branding in Ecommerce with Tique Chandler

In the crazy world of ecom entrepreneurship that I live in, some of the most valuable lessons or the best wisdom or the best advice that I've ever received are from people that are just doing it too. It's a little bit unusual, especially in the world of Amazon where I come from for people to talk about their brand and share their brand story and show what they're doing because they're afraid of copycats. That's not our guest today, our guest today has really, really agreed to bring a lot of great content to us. Everything from branding implications to product differentiation, to working with her family to some extent or another. It's going to be a great episode. Lots of really great value in this one. Please make sure to listen till the end, and here we go.

Hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of The Growth Gear podcast. I just got back from an event in Hawaii where I spent a lot of time talking to successful sellers and solopreneurs and there were a couple of questions that consistently came up, topics that were heavily discussed and debated. One of them was really when we take the leap and we jump in full-time. There were some sellers there that are obviously full-time, ecommerce folks, but there were also some even selling millions a year that are still thinking out when they would take the leap from their corporate job or their regular job, so to speak. There's a lot of discussion about branding and how to incorporate or if we should incorporate personal branding into our product brands, and just seems appropriate that we have our guest on today that has a lot of experience in these questions and should be able to give us some insight and some answers to think about. Without further ado, I'll introduce our guest, Tique Chandler. Welcome to the podcast, Tique.

Hi, Tim. Thanks for having me.

You are in Canada and you grew up around honey.

I grew up in a super tiny town in Alberta called Scandia with 125 people, which is a lot smaller of a town than most people have ever been to ever, and my parents were the beekeepers there. They are actually Canada's largest beekeepers. They have 15,000 hives and it made for a really unique childhood experience. I was out beekeeping super young, and in the summers, I was getting stung four times a day when I was working with the bees. It just gave me a really good appreciation for how hard the bees are working, how hard beekeepers are working and how special food is. From there I went on to university in Vancouver, worked in tech sales, got a lot of skills around technology and talking to people, and mostly, I hate it.

I was miserable at my tech sales job. I thought if I was going to be that stressed, I might as well be stressed for myself. I think a lot of people can probably relate to that, and took the leap and did it on my own. My company, Chandler Honey, launched in 2020. We take my parents' organic honey and we infuse it with different premium ingredients. We use real vanilla bean, we use hand-zested lemons to make really interesting flavors, like creme brulee or lemon ginger, peach lychee. We have beautiful branding, if I do say so myself, and just trying to market ourselves as a really gourmet, interesting, unique spin on honey products.

Is this something that you started while you were in your tech sales job? Did you walk out of that job and decide, I got to figure something out, and then you started this after, or what was the transition?

I quit my tech sales job and had no plan, really. I knew that I wanted to start my new business eventually, especially with having parents who were entrepreneurs. I knew that I wanted to have my business eventually and was just gathering skills until I was ready and I took my hatred of my job and I said, "Okay, this is the time. This is when I'm ready." The pandemic happened to hit coincidentally around the same time, but it wasn't a catalyst for my decision. I was just ready to take a chance on myself and that's what I did.

Why didn't you go to work with your parents? I mean, most young folks that have parents at a successful company, they end up working with them. I guess that wasn't your path.

That's a very good question. Not my path yet. My parents are still quite young, they're 55. They're toying with the idea of retirement maybe in the next 10 years or so. I really just wanted to see if I could do something on my own. Maybe that's a little bit ego-driven, but just to prove to myself that I can do something on my own two feet before I dive into my parents' business, maybe eventually. Also, they live in a really small town, as I mentioned, and I am living the city life right now. If you can see my background, if you watch, I have a CN Tower of Toronto in my background and I really love the city life for right now. This is where my husband and I ended up, so I just thought I'd give a shot out here.

As you're looking around for a different opportunity, you decided, hey, right now in my life, I'm not getting into the wholesale honey industry. There were a lot of opportunities, obviously, and you had access to base honey. I don't know if that's the right term, but honey, how did you decide that this was the path that you wanted to go down, which is a high-end retail infused honey? Talk about that. Was this an idea you always had? Was it something you came with in spur of the moment, or did you go through a lot of research to figure out that this is what you're going to invest your time and money in?

I did a lot of research into the market and seeing what was out there. Infused honey did exist, it's not like I've invented it by any means, but I saw a lot of companies using what I considered subpar ingredients, using lemon oils or extracts and stabilizers and fillers rather than the real thing. Honey on its own is a natural preservative, so you can get away with using the real thing, like having real lemon zest in there. I knew that I could do it better, and I also know I had a fairly compelling family story with all the history with my honey.

I also looked around the beekeeping industry and did not see a lot of women, let alone, young women. I just found myself a nice little niche that I thought that I could shine as well. Looking around in the industry, there's a lot of ugly honey jars out there. I don't know what it is about honey specifically, but it's always branded as a boring staple pantry product that is kind of supposed to be ground luggage. I don't know why that is, but I wanted to bring a bit of youthfulness and color and polish to my own brand. I think that really helps me stand out on the shelf.

Man, I feel like you're really throwing some shade at the old plastic black bear bottle that I grew up with for 20 years in my cabinet. Probably the same bottle I grew up with the entire 20 years, if I had to guess.

And I don't know why they haven't been changing in the honey industry because people are willing to pay quite a bit of money for good honey and good honey should cost money, but the jars look like it's the cheapest product that has ever existed. I want to honor the amount of work that the bees put into the honey and give it a beautiful home.

I'm looking at, or I was looking at your website earlier and you've got amazing branding, you've got all sorts of really compelling marketing, like the brand story is awesome. I want to dive into that in a second. As you got started with this business, you had to create formulations, you had to get your packaging, you had to get your marketing. There was a lot you had to do, and most of our listeners understand what those steps are. What was the biggest difficulty for you? What was the hardest thing in launching this company that you had to figure out?

I'd say it was a mental switch between, okay, I can do this on my own and this is going to be a really homegrown thing to, okay, actually I want to do this for real. Let's put some money aside and let's invest in proper branding, proper product photography, proper logos. Let's do this for real. As soon as I kind of mentally switch to, okay, this is going to be my job, I am betting on myself here, let's do this for real. I feel like that is when things started to change. I did have an MVP myself where I had great recipes and I was toying with a ton of different recipes, but I made my own logos and had cheap jars and it looked just as bad as all the honey I was seeing next to it. I decided to get a graphic designer, real product photographers. I did the website myself, but websites, I think come together nicely if you have good photos. Just mentally knowing that this was going to be a real professional thing, that mindset shift made a big difference.

I know that your ecom sales are flagshipped with Shopify. You also mentioned you have around 200 brick-and-mortar stores in Canada that your product is in. Did you start with the brick-and-mortar distribution or did you start with Shopify or did you do both at the same time?

Both at the same time, but I was surprised at how well ecommerce took off quickly, and I don't know if that's it, I just have a really good friends family network who was... This is also in the middle of the pandemic. This was November, 2020, so people tend to shop online more, which was just luck for me. Lots of people in my network shared it on their Instagram, shared it on their LinkedIn, and right from month one I was getting orders from people I'd never heard of. It was luckily November 2, which I now know is my busy season for gifts, but it kind of just took off online quickly.

Then I had a few stores reach out to me directly and they said, "Can I have your sell sheet?" I did not have a sell sheet, but I said, "Of course." I put one together, and from there I had some really good initial momentum. From there, I feel like the main part of my job even today is sales, and that's where my background is in. I am cold calling, cold emailing five to 10 stores a day trying to get my honey in their stores, and I treat the sales component of this job really seriously, and that's helped me get into so many stores.

A lot of brands and a lot of companies that I'm familiar with really struggle with the idea of branding. Now when you say, hey, you wanted a premium product, we get that. You wanted a differentiator, you get that. What was interesting to me when I was scanning your website is you're on the homepage, and you've talked a little bit about having a story from your family with the existing honey business, and you've obviously put some time into branding the company well and you made a strategic decision to be heavily involved in that. Can you talk to me about maybe the thought process of why you decided to personally be so involved in the brand story?

It was one of the early decisions I made. Even calling the company Chandler Honey, which is my last name, was a very strategic, thoughtful choice. I knew that if my last name was going to be on these jars, it would pull myself to a really high standard of product quality. I know that I stand by my product and I know it's really delicious. I know that the quality is there because I'm overseeing all the jars being poured, if not pouring in myself, and it's something that's just very important to me. Part of that comes from, like I said, looking around in the industry and not seeing many female faces in the beekeeping industry and knowing that my experience in beekeeping was a little bit special. Part of it was ego maybe, but also, it's a good way to make sure that I'm going to keep being as involved in this as possible. I'm really happy with that decision.

You talked a little bit before we started recording about social media, and social media I assume has played a big part in the growth of your company. I struggle with social media. I can look at somebody else's and I can say this is good or bad, but actually creating it and actually setting up the processes to continue to create it, I really struggle with that. You came from beekeeping and getting stung by bees and then you jumped into tech sales. Do you feel like your expertise now at social media came naturally? Is it something you had to learn? If it came naturally, where did that come from? Give some perspective on how social media is working for you and how you landed in that role or that success, because I know that a lot of people struggle with it.

Like we all are, we're good consumers first. I know what I like to see in a brand. I know when a brand grabs me and engages me with their story. I know when I feel connected to a founder, I know all of these things. I start following as many of those brands as I can, taking inspiration from them, but also, being a little bit more strategic about it too. Especially, at the beginning, I would map out at least my next nine Instagram posts to keep my grid aligned. I used to think that, that was important. Now I know what people want to see and I can kind of change up my content based on giving my followers a little bit of variety.

That said, yes, I feel like I'm good at social media and I really love getting on stories and showing my face and feeling connected with my audience. I have been humbled so deeply in the last year with TikTok and other social media platforms that I just don't know how people go viral. I don't know how brands make it there. Maybe TikTok is not for brands. I don't really know. I haven't figured it out yet. Even I treat myself like a learner always. I'm always following brands that I think are interesting on TikTok, what makes them interesting, why would I want to use my free time following these people and just constantly reiterating, so that's all you can do.

What is the biggest struggle you've had in your business? You've obviously done well. You're in a lot of brick-and-mortar stores. You're all over Shopify. You've got great branding. You've got a great product, supposedly. You haven't sent me any free samples to validate that, if that were to happen.

Well, we can do that.

Everybody that I talk to that has a business, or especially myself, I feel like there is one giant crisis in at least the first year, the first couple of years that turned into one of the biggest lessons that we had, one of the biggest growth phases that we had. What's one of those crises that you encountered and what did you learn on the back of that, that was able to keep you afloat and then turn into success?

I'd say even still to this day, my biggest challenge is scaling up. I have access to a ton of money, I have a pretty big production space that we could ramp up at any time we're ready to rocket and have been for a while. It's just getting into more and more stores. Last year, I took a gamble on hiring. Food business is funny. I've learned that in order to get onto grocery store shelves, you need to have a distributor. I applied to lots of distributors. I was getting rejected because they say you need a broker, so I applied to brokers. They needed a monthly retainer fee. It gets very expensive very quickly. I took a gamble on that and it did not work out whatsoever.

That was the most expensive mistake my company has made, and this was just last year and we're just sorting it or just breaking from that now. Lessons that I've learned from that, I think the lesson at the end of the day is still to take risks. I know that, that risk in particular didn't work out, but in order for me to take this to the next level, I'm going to need to take another risk like that. luckily, my ecommerce and store sales are strong enough to support financial risks like that. If I just continue doing what I'm doing now, which is comfortable and feels easy for me, I'm never going to become a huge business like I want to be. I'm not going to be in the hands of every Canadian or every American. That would be amazing.

Even when risks don't work out and it feels incredibly discouraging, you just got to keep doing it, and there's at some point only so much information you can take in before you make a decision and you just got to keep betting on yourself. One thing I think I did specifically learn from that is I wish I would've gotten more references. There was one company that they worked with that I talked to, and I wish I would've gotten three or so. I don't even know if it was a bad broker, just bad luck. We'll keep throwing things at a wall and eventually something's going to hit. I'm still feeling pretty confident about it.

Throwing things at the wall, is that how you came up with your different infusions and your different flavors? Because I was looking at your website, you've got some strange stuff in there, like lychee doesn't grow in Canada. How do you come up with some of this stuff or what was the process? Going forward, as you continue to develop your product line, what are you doing to test that or to get feedback or are you just coming up with all of it yourself?

No, I try to get as much feedback as possible. I have five flavors that have been there from the beginning, and how I got those is I probably made 40 different flavors just as creative as I possibly could have been, and I made 40 that I thought tasted good, and then I made everyone who was around me taste them and give me their feedback. I was consistently getting seven in the top five, so I just made a call myself saying, okay, there should be a little bit of variety. I like this one because it fills in different taste gaps here. That was using feedback.

Now, I luckily have feedback from my social media following. Even though you can't taste things through the phone, people are always giving me good ideas like, "I'd love to see this honey, like jasmine grapefruit. That sounds amazing." I'll go and test it or I'll go on live and taste it in front of people and tell them what I'm tasting, get lots of feedback from my customers and go from there. It's a balance of getting as much feedback as possible, but at the end of the day, I am making the decision myself just trying to round out my flavor collection. That's my favorite part of the job is being creative and creating these new flavors. It's super fun.

What does your family think of this? Because they haven't established business, they were doing it a certain way, and you came in and completely reinvented the honey business for your family. Do you think that, I don't know, they're slowly coming along that this is a great idea? At first, were they a little bit hesitant? Tell me that dynamic and that thought there.

I'm so lucky they've been extremely supportive from the very beginning. They really had no interest in creating a brand themselves. Like the honey that they were creating, they would sell at market price to a middle man who would then blend it with other honeys and then distribute it across Canada. If you're in Canada eating honey on the supermarket shelves, chances are it's already my parents honey blended with other honeys. They were just happy focusing, and still are, happy focused on the beekeeping aspect and creating as much honey as possible and then selling it to a middle man and not worrying about the brand at all. What I'm doing is complimentary to what they're doing. I think they're happy that if, well, they always keep a little bit of Chandler honey at their own farm so that if people want to come by and not just get a plastic tub of honey, they want something more gift-able, they can take my honey. I think they're pretty happy with it. I feel lucky to have their support.

They probably gave you really great terms on your wholesale purchases.

Which is so lucky. They're always the last people to get paid, which I'm so grateful for. No, that's definitely a perk of having the family business being adjacent that I do not take it for granted.

When you were talking about ecommerce, you talked about Shopify, your B2C site. Do you have a plan or do you have an opinion on marketplaces, Amazon, Walmart, what's that look like on your distribution roadmap?

It's possible. I'm just not an expert at it yet, but I tried Walmart Marketplace, didn't have a lot of traction. I even tried Amazon Marketplace as well. My problem with that is that I was selling jars individually so that by the time that they were sold on Amazon, they weren't packaged nicely and they were breaking and it was a huge logistical headache. I was getting bad reviews. I just shut the whole thing down because I panicked. I do want to relaunch on Amazon. I think that there's a lot of power in Amazon, but I do need to revamp how the product is going out. There maybe a gift pack that is already Styrofoamed up and foamed up so that if it's being bounced around in a warehouse, which it will be, at least it's protected. I learned a lot, but that's another risk that I need to retake and after I learned a little bit more about it.

What about international? You've got a boutique product that is sourced in Canada, it's sourced in North America, the flavor palette is designed for North Americans. When it comes to food and consumables, international expansion can be really, really hard. I actually watched a, I want to say a 20-minute YouTube video the other day on how the Milky Way candy bar between the UK and the US is completely different because everybody has a different flavor style. Is this one of those products that you think is going to be hard to expand internationally, or if you don't know or if it's not, what are you thinking about in terms of that type of expansion?

I do know that this light prairie honey from my parents in Alberta is really coveted in Asia. Japan, particularly, the lighter the honey is, the more they think of it as gourmet and fancy and gift-able. Knowing that, Asia would be my first expansion if I was to go over there. I would probably do the same thing right from the start as go over, get as many people to test a bunch of recipes as possible, and I would have no problem reformulating or rebranding or whatever is needed over there once I got feedback. That would be a fun business trip to go over and get people on the street to taste your honey. That sounds amazing.

Just a few weeks ago, I was in Japan learning how to sell in Japan. I just made a note. I'll follow up with an email on some ideas I have there, maybe some connections I can send your way.

Awesome.

In Chandler Honey, you've got a good product, you've also got exceptional branding and marketing, from what I can tell, just looking. Which do you think is more important, is it the product or is it how we sell the product?

At the end of the day, I do think it comes down to the product. Having a product that you believe in 10,000% helps it all fall into place, especially even as a salesperson. If you believe in that product and you stand by it, and if anybody ever has a problem, like I'm so good about replacing a customer order, giving new jars, giving an apology if a jar broke in the mail, all these things, because I know that this is such an excellent product and I believe in it so deeply. I think you can't have branding while go so far if you don't believe in your product fully. If I had to choose between one or the other, I would say product.

I think that, that's maybe opposite of what a lot of people think in ecommerce, especially from the Amazon world where I come from, we sell sometimes a bunch of crap, but we market it well, and we see that, that's a short-lived game plan.

I would agree.

Many times, we're not thinking about the product initially. We're thinking about just differentiating a very common product instead of going deeper into something that we can get behind and sell. Love hearing this. For those of you that are listening, product, product, product, and I understand that honey is common, but the product that Chandler is selling is not honey, it's the different experience. It's the different packaging, and when I say packaging, I mean blending. It's not honey, it's like infused honey. It's a completely different product. Did I say that right?

Yeah, totally. Especially, in this day and age, when Amazon on websites, reviews are real and people are reading reviews before they buy a product, that's so important. If you have a product that you can't stand by that is so far, it's going to catch up to you eventually. I do agree that, that's a short-sighted business plan. You can have the most beautiful branding in the world, but if your product doesn't stand on its own two feet, I think it's a short-lived business strategy.

Agreed. If anybody wanted to stock your brand a little bit, look at this branding that I'm talking about, look at the product, what's the best place for me to go to do that on the web, but also on social media?

On the internet or on the web is chandlerhoney.com. For the Americans, we've got chandlerhoney.ca, if you're Canadian as well. Then on Instagram it's @chandler.honey, and I'm really good about answering my DMs. If anybody out there has any feedback for me, but also questions, I love chatting with entrepreneurs, slide on into my DMs, I'd love to have a chat. You can even set up a virtual coffee if you're interested. I'm very approachable.

Amazing. What an offer. I don't think anybody has ever offered that on the podcast before, so thank you. I know that there are a lot of people that I'm sure are listening to this episode that are going to resonate or find some value in what you've shared, and hopefully, maybe if you'll reach out and take you up on that offer. Thank you everybody for listening to another episode. Remember, if you liked what we've talked about here, if you liked this podcast, leave a review. It's so important to leave reviews so that more people can find this on those podcast platforms you're listening to. You can also give us a thumbs up, give us a follow on YouTube. If you have any questions for myself or for Tique on YouTube, leave a comment underneath this video and we'll get back to you. Thanks everybody for being here, and we'll see you on the next episode.