Lucky Tail Founder and CEO, Susie Minier, chillin with her family
Jeff Gorjans
After 26 years in the corporate world, Susie Minier found herself unemployed at the outset of the pandemic. Instead of panicking, she seized the opportunity and launched Lucky Tail, a pet products company, in the Fall of 2020.
Susie quickly realized that as a sole founder, she needed a go-to-market strategy that would minimize the complexity of her launch and allow her to focus on achieving product-market fit. As such, she set up a storefront on a third-party platform and then began to methodically learn as much as she could about marketing and finance.
About six months after launch, Lucky Tail’s first product is a leader in its category and Susie is generating hundreds of thousands in sales.
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John Greathouse: Susie, thanks for making the time to connect. I really admire your story – it’s not easy to transition from (being) an executive at a fairly large company to flying without a net as a solo founder.
What has been the hardest aspect of your career change? What have you found to be the most surprising / rewarding?
Susie Minier: I think the timing of my corporate departure, with the start of COVID-19 soon after, has made me miss two parts the most… the camaraderie of working with a team and the travel. I would travel international four-to-six times a year and now I get excited about traveling out of the house for an errand. I miss the challenge of visiting new places and working with new people. But certainly, the most rewarding has been all of the knowledge and education I’ve gained the past 18 months, especially finance and marketing.
Greathouse: Yes, I never thought I could get so excited about going to the grocery store.
Being a product executive is a great background for starting a CPG (consumer packaged goods) venture. What areas of expertise did you need to shore up, once your started Lucky Tail? Is there something you wish you had spent more time doing while at your former employer to better prepare you for your entrepreneurial journey?
Minier: You know how they say, “You don’t know what you don’t know?” well, I didn’t realize all that I didn’t know! I wish I had known how to read a P-and-L (profit and loss statement) and what all of the lines of a balance sheet meant. I do now.
I also wish I had spent more time understanding what that elusive word “marketing” really meant. I’ve been a sponge this past year, absorbing all I can about finance and marketing.
Greathouse: Good for you. Online marketing, especially in the direct-to-consumer space is fascinating and ever changing.
What was the single best and worst time / money investment you made in your first 90 days?
Minier: The best investment was my membership in the Titan Network of elite Amazon sellers. I gain so many daily nuggets of wisdom that give me a huge advantage as a seller. My worst investment was probably spending too much time choosing exactly the right product. Speed to market is key and I would have gained tremendous knowledge just putting something out that was 85% right rather than losing time waiting for it to be 100% right.
Greathouse: Agreed, but sometimes it’s hard to know when to launch and when to do, “just one more” revision.
The impetus for starting Lucky Tail was your exit from your long-time employer. However, you could have tackled any number of markets. Why did you address the needs of pet lovers, rather than working on a product segment more akin to your background in apparel?
Minier: I am my customer avatar! I treat my dog as one of my kids and she is a part of our family and daily routine. That gives me an edge since I can identify with the pain points I’m trying to solve. I also know how recession-proof the pet industry is, people will keep spending money on their pets and cut expenses elsewhere.
Greathouse: It’s clear your initial product, The Original Doggy Bag , immediately achieved product / market fit. I assume you put your product research skills to work before you launched.
What can entrepreneurs learn from your approach to assessing market fit?
Minier: Product development starts with identifying a pain point, seeing what’s out in the market to address it and putting all of the best features together to create that unique selling proposition.
For me, I didn’t even know something like my Doggy Bag existed. All I knew was that we would throw our dogs stuff in a plastic grocery bag whenever we went on a trip. The bag would tear, the dog would get into her food or it wouldn’t be big enough to carry what we needed. So that put me to work to design the best features you could want when traveling with your favorite pup.
Greathouse: Nice. I often remind my UCSB students to, “solve a problem you experience firsthand, as you are the customer you’re serving.”
How would you describe your brand ethos and what have you done to maintain a consistent “voice” in your ads, Amazon store and customer communications?
Minier: Lucky Tail is all about treating your dog like family. Your dog gives you 24/7 unconditional love, don’t they deserve the best? The same human-quality product but made specifically for dogs.
Thankfully, Amazon has supported brands like me with additional brand content formats where I can tell my story. It really helps our small, U.S. based business stand out from the multitudes of factory-direct Chinese sellers who care only about lowest price and nothing about quality or customer service.
Greathouse: Speaking of Amazon, you decided to initially launch there, rather than transacting sales on your own site. What drove this decision?
Minier: Amazon is the largest e-commerce platform, so I have access to millions of customers that shop Amazon daily. Plus, with FBA (fulfilled by Amazon), I can offer my product through Amazon Prime and all storage and fulfillment is handled by Amazon. So, I avoid the overhead of my own DC (distribution center) and figuring out Facebook ads to drive customers to my own Shopify site.
Sure, Amazon charges me selling fees for this, but in the end, it’s no more than I’d be spending on warehousing and marketing. I just knew that first I needed to learn e-commerce rather than trying to learn e-commerce, storage/fulfillment and marketing all at once. I also knew that my strength in product would help me stand out from other Amazon sellers.
Greathouse: You have a strong presence on Amazon. What tips can you share with entrepreneurs who haven’t launched on a third-party marketplace like Amazon or Walmart.com?
Minier: It’s competitive and becoming more and more competitive. You have to have a great quality product, that’s number one. But also, you need to master keyword research, create a well-optimized listing and build reviews quickly.
There’s a lot of pieces to the puzzle and it’s definitely not a “set it and forget it” business model. If Amazon isn’t changing rules, then your competitor is doing something that you need to be aware of.
The one major downside of Amazon is that you do not own the customer data. I’ve worked hard at setting up automated chat marketing campaigns so I can get to know my customer and ask them for contact info for retargeting future products.
Greathouse: I understand that, at least currently, you’d prefer to not take on investor capital. Do you plan to bootstrap growth solely from sales or have you explored non-dilutive, debt options?
Minier: I’m definitely on the path towards non-dilutive options. I need to add products and scale more quickly than simple bootstrapping will allow. I plan to get a strong sales record on the books for the next few months and outline my growth projections to determine what kind of financial support I need.
Greathouse: What is your ultimate vision for Lucky Tail? What will the company look like in the coming years?
Minier: My vision for the next three-to-five years is to build a business with 10 plus products and partner with a dog rescue group to receive some of the profits. By five-to-seven years, the brand will be built on a format that I can decide if I’m ready to sell and retire or sell and start over!
You can follow John on Twitter: @johngreathouse
