Miscellaneous
Visit Clare onlineSupport the show-------->Fabian Geyrhalter: Welcome to the show, Nicole.Nicole Gibbons: Thanks so much for having me.Fabian Geyrhalter: Absolutely. No, it's so great having you here. You are the founder of Clare, where you saw a huge opportunity to paint the interior paint industry in new, specifically with designer-curated colors, mess-free peel and stick paint swatches, which are really cool, and premium zero VOC paint delivered to your customer stores. You set out to take the pain out of paint, which I read somewhere on your site. That's not me saying this. You're your modern brand that has pioneered an easier, faster, and more inspiring way to shop for paint. Your mission is to help people everywhere create a home they love.Clare is just a little over four years old and must've been born out of the interior design company you're also running, but your career started at Victoria Secret where you served as the global director of communications and events. Tell us a little bit about how did that idea of Clare, how was it born? How did it all begin?Nicole Gibbons: Yeah. Well, I just want to correct one thing. We're actually only two and a half years old. Yeah. So we're a very young startup in our trajectory, but the idea was really born out of this desire to help people create beautiful spaces. I spent, like you've mentioned, a decade working in retail as a PR executive. While in that job, I started side hustling to explore my passion for interior design. So I did that sort of overlapping for about five years, more or less writing a blog every day and doing dabbling in small interior design projects on the side. Then finally at the beginning of 2013, took the leap to focus on building my design business and my personal brand full time. So after doing that for a few years, I started thinking about what would be the next extension of my personal brand.I never wanted to just be an interior designer. I loved the Martha Stewart approach in that she parlayed her career as a food and lifestyle expert into products that spanned multiple categories and just this massive career that enabled so many people to buy into the Martha Stewart aesthetic. So I started thinking about what I could do in the home space that was along those same lines and explored a number of business opportunities and kind of stumbled upon this white space that is paint.As a designer, I bought lots of paint. I shopped for lots of paint. I helped lots of people choose paint colors, whether it be my private clients, people that I would help doing television projects, or even just folks who would write in on my blog, or be a social media where I was just sort of offering unsolicited free advice when they had questions.I realized that shopping for paint is a really difficult process for the average person. If you're lucky enough or fortunate enough to be working with a designer, or an architect, or someone who can guide you, the process is quite easy. You have someone that you trust who makes the selections for you and you pretty much trust their judgment and sign off, versus the average person who's going at it alone, walks into a Big Box home improvement store, stares up at a wall of 3000 colors. If they want something as simple as white paint, they think it's going to be easy. And then they realize, Holy pal, there are 300 shades of white. How do I know which one is right? And then sort of thus begins this cycle of this painful experience, decision fatigue.Once I realized how the industry was structured, it's highly consolidated, there are really like two or three major players that dominate the whole entire paint market. It just felt like the perfect opportunity. The companies that dominate the paint industry are centuries old. So these are brands that are so giant. They really never felt the pressure to innovate or modernize.When I started Clare and really kind of came up with the idea, probably around four years ago or so, there were so many other industries where difficult shopping experience had been improved and modernized. Think about glasses with Warby Parker or mattresses or all these other categories where someone took a product that was really difficult to shop for and made it an easy, convenient experience. As someone who is incredibly passionate about home and about helping others create beautiful homes, this just seemed like the perfect opportunity and it was a massive market. I didn't want to just do a furniture line or something that would have been more expected and obvious for an interior designer to pursue. I really wanted to build something from the ground up, tackle a massive market, and create a sort of industry-changing business model and brand.Fabian Geyrhalter: That's remarkable. Those peel and stick paint swatches, it sounds like nothing, but it's so huge, right? I mean, if anyone who went through that painstaking process that you just hinted at on how to come up with the perfect paint choice, you have to get all these tiny little cans, which by the way, is horrible for the environment, all these tiny little cans from paint stores. And then you have to paint on your house, most of the time on the exterior interior, depending on what you paint, and you keep going back and forth between the hardware store in your home. It's a mess, but those swatches, they seem kind of like post-its by nature. It's just so simple. You just put it on the ball.How did you guys around to matching the color on, because we're talking about print and "paper," versus paint, which is such a different medium. It must be so hard to match that identically. I think you guys pulled that off, right?Nicole Gibbons: Yeah. I think we nailed it. I mean, the interesting thing about color that most people don't realize is that color is a science, and any color, really all forms of color has data associated with it and can be broken down into numerical data so that when you're in the color matching process, you can actually measure the accuracy of our paint swatches to the finished actual paint finish within the most minutiae of a Delta E.So it's actually quite a scientific process to ensure the color match. It's somewhat manual, somewhat scientific. You might have to go back and forth a few times until you get it right, but if we can kind of measure to make sure that you're within pretty much an exact match range and that's how you ensure color accuracy.So we have a pretty detailed process. I think a lot of like with traditional paint brands, when you have thousands and thousands of colors, and they're not offering peel and sticks watches in most cases. So there's the little tiny paint chips that you take off the wall at the hardware store. A lot of times people feel they don't match. I think when your pallet is to the point of being four or 5,000 colors deep, you sort of lose some of that quality control.It's very difficult to maintain 100% accuracy when you have that many colors and especially if you're not actually controlling your distribution channels, because a lot of people also don't realize when you buy paint from a Big Box store, they're carrying multiple brands. So they have to have a color it dispensers or sort of colorant in store that work across all the different brands that they carry. So with that, you almost lose a little bit of quality control as well, because you're working within a colorant system that maybe isn't proprietary and there's just more margin for error for the output in the store to look different than the swatch.Fabian Geyrhalter: Clare is 100% D2C. It seems like having your paint salt at a hardware store would go against what you stand for as a brand, but would you toy with Clare experience stores or pop-up stores of any sorts?Nicole Gibbons: Yeah. My belief and the whole reason I started Clare was that I felt that the paint shopping experience needed to be re-imagined. We started online because that's where our competitors were not, but I think that there's a huge opportunity to reimagine the future of what a paint store looks like, or what a paint aisle within a Big Box store might look like. So that prospect is super exciting and definitely something we think about, and it's really a matter of timing and opportunity, and those kinds of two things being aligned before we'll probably make it happen.Fabian Geyrhalter: Which obviously is not during a pandemic. But other than that, it's an interesting opportunity. Absolutely. Let's talk about the evil side of paint, how to dispose of leftover paint. How do you navigate sustainability with Clare?Nicole Gibbons: Yeah, I mean, I think for us, sustainability is a focus on kind of two major things. One is the product and how it impacts your home, and your health, and the air inside your home. And the other are just business practices. So things like our packaging and other efforts that we make to ensure that we're really minimizing our impact on the environment.So a lot of people don't realize that paint as an industry is one of the most dishonesty and misleading industries out there. It's a chemical product first and foremost. So no matter how you try to spin it, there is no such thing as a safe chemical paint. It's still a chemical product at the end of the day. Now you can certainly have a better formulation, but it's still a chemical product. It's not like the paint is made of grass and leaves or whatever.Fabian Geyrhalter: Yeah, yeah.Nicole Gibbons: So the paint industry has really been misleading with customers about what's in their paint. Even stemming back from like the 40s and 50s when paint was made with lead, which as we now know, is very toxic and harmful to humans and to the environment, but one of the biggest paint companies in the world knowingly continued to sell paint to their customers for decades, knowing that it was harmful to human health and didn't stop selling lead paint until it was banned by the federal government in the 1970s.So that's a very good example of how the paint industry has historically operated at profit over people, I think. Even in more recent times, every few years, in fact, one of the major paint companies is paying massive fines to the FTC for misleading marketing.Several years ago, when the government started regulating, or the EPA started regulating VOC contents and paint, and stands for Volatile Organic Compounds, it's essentially like carbon emissions and CO2 emissions that are emitted by a lot of paints, not Clare, but when the government started putting these thresholds, so they would say, canopy can't have more than X volume of VOC content, what brands ended up doing, and another important thing to understand is how paint is actually sold at the point of sale.So generally companies like a Big Box store or a hardware store will stock a base paint formula, which is essentially like a white paint. And then the colorant is dispensed at the point of sale. So brands would manufacture those base formulas to fit zero VOC thresholds, but then the colorants that were being used were not zero VOC.Fabian Geyrhalter: Interesting.Nicole Gibbons: So people thought that they were buying a product that was better for them, healthier for their homes, et cetera when in reality, as soon as you've chosen your color and they put the color in the can at the hardware store, you have a paint that's now back to being filled with chemicals. So even that type of misleading was happening in more recent times.So for us, transparency is super important as well. All our paint is zero VOC. It's GREENGUARD Gold certified. GREENGUARD is a green certification that applies to many products, but GREENGUARD Gold is the highest tier of GREENGUARD certification and for paint. What that means is, they actually put the paint in an environmental chamber that's meant to mimic the air inside a typical home environment, and it measures the off-gassing for two weeks to ensure that it stays below the zero VOC threshold during that entire time, because paint can continue to off-gas for years actually. So when you buy a paint that's not zero VOC, it will be emitting carbon compounds into your air potentially for years. A lot of people don't realize that. Especially nowadays, when we're spending all of our time inside in our homes, it's very important that we make better choices and there's just so much harmful stuff all around us. So we just wanted to minimize that as much as we possibly could.A lot of our packaging and products, like some of our paint supplies and things are made from recycled materials. So whenever possible, we really try to make the best possible choices and we are not doing everything perfectly admittedly. As a young company, there's still a lot of room for improvement. There are certain things that we want to make even more sustainable, but I think we're off to a really good start and we're as transparent as we can be with our customers. We hope that that gives them competence in our brand and in our product.Fabian Geyrhalter: I love this. Just in my last episode, I talked about that same idea where even though you're trying really hard and you think like you're doing everything as well as possible, there are some things that you yourself know as a brand. You're not quite there yet. You talk about that too. I think that alone is such a huge difference when you think about the paint companies from the 40s and 50s, right. It is so nice as a consumer today to see brands talk about not only the things they do well but also the things that they know want to improve upon because that is just as important and that's how you feel like a brand is really transparent.Let's talk about transparency for a second here. Moving over to your brand language, which is really real. It's very down to earth, you had an instant post about wop remixed, which of course, stood for where there's paint. Your colors are named Headspace, Whipped, No Filter, and Dirty Martini. How did the brand language manifest itself? Did it start with a mantra that you set and then it organically built from there?Nicole Gibbons: Honestly, so much of it is an extension of me and my personal brand voice, to be honest, but also like the customer that we're reaching and what I think resonates with them. Also just looking at the market and looking at traditional paint brands, I think paint brands are pretty boring. We wanted every element of our brand experience to feel memorable and to evoke emotion. So when it comes to things like the color names, we wanted to have fun with that and create names that made you feel something. Our brand voice on social media, we want to be relatable. We want to talk about what's happening in pop culture and relate our product back to that because that's what people can care about. That's what's top of mind.We don't want to just be this faceless corporate entity that no one actually cares about. We want to be a brand that people connect with and they follow us because we are approachable and, or entertaining, and inspiring. So that's super important. We try to have those core brand, voice pillars of being friendly and approachable, carry throughout every aspect of the brand from the website to our social and more. It's really just, I think, another way that we differentiate ourselves from the market.Fabian Geyrhalter: I was just about to ask that, how do you set and keep those standards as it relates to the voice? You just answered that there are certain pillars around which you want to navigate as you talk to your customer. But talking about naming, how did the name come about? It's a very modern take on naming. We have many first-name brands floating around, but not Nicole, it's Clare.Nicole Gibbons: Yeah.Fabian Geyrhalter: Once you try to actually get some help finding a perfect color, you agree that with a message on your website that says, "Hi, I'm Clare. Think of me as your personal interior designer. I'm here to help you find the perfect color for your space." What's the story behind the name? Who is Clare?Nicole Gibbons: So it's so funny. I wish I had a more profound name, but originally, when I was thinking of names or when Clare was just in the idea phase, I wanted to be able to talk to some people about what I was working on. So initially, my only intent was just to come up with a working title, just like a good enough name for now and then come up with something perfect later. So I probably spent like 20 minutes. I was looking on a baby naming website where you can reverse look at, like name meaning. So if you wanted your kid's name to mean happiness or whatever, you type in happiness, and it tells you all the names that relate back to that.So I literally typed in things that tied back to color. So I looked up adjectives like bright, and colorful, and vibrant, and whatever, and saw what names came out. Clare just sort of stood out. Clare comes from a Latin root word, clarus that means bright and brilliant. There's a lot of fun wordplay there, both brilliant and bright in terms of color, but also brilliant in terms of being innovative and forward thinking as a brand. I Googled it. There was no other brand that really had the name Clare. There was like an insurance kind of, I don't remember exactly what they sold. There was something, but in a completely non-competitive space.So it was a name that was available and it was a good working title. And then as I really started kind of moving forward with the brand and doing some conceptual branding work and things like that, it sort of just stuck and it fit. There was no other name that made sense. But I think originally, I knew I wanted a name that was personified so we could really build a personality around the brand. That's why I went to a baby-naming website. And I wanted it to be friendly and approachable. And I intentionally wanted a feminine name, because in the paint world, all of the brands that dominate are these hyper-masculine names, Sherwin Williams and Benjamin Moore.Fabian Geyrhalter: So true. Yeah.Nicole Gibbons: I think they are not appealing to who's really making the household decisions, which is usually the woman of the house. I felt like paint brands are overly masculine in their appeal.Fabian Geyrhalter: Yeah.Nicole Gibbons: I think part of the reason is because a lot of them are catering to professionals and a lot of pro painters are men. But at the same time, when you think about the DIY market, the people making the hustle decisions are women.Fabian Geyrhalter: Yeah.Nicole Gibbons: I think the big brands are kind of failing to really resonate in an authentic way. So that was something that was super important as a brand founded by a woman in an industry that is dominated by men to take a complete 180 approach to every aspect of our brand, including the choice of name.Fabian Geyrhalter: So interesting. I never thought about how those paint names are just absolutely not reflecting today's do it yourself customer. Super interesting. Your selection is still narrow and it's highly curated, and that is by design, less is more. A recent customer review on your website stated, "The limited, but lovely colors totally saved me from having an existential crisis over the thousands of options from other brands. How do you control the number of options to give your customers once you introduce a new color? I know you just introduced a couple of new colors, how do you play this game of keeping things fresh, but yet having it very curated so that people don't freak out about the 4,000 options of white?Nicole Gibbons: Yeah. Well, I mean, we launched with 55 colors and originally, we believed that those covered most of the use cases you would ever have in a home, right? There are certainly opportunities to expand the palette and mix in a few new things, but it's not hard to keep things curated relative to the traditional paint brands that are in the thousands.Fabian Geyrhalter: Yeah.Nicole Gibbons: Building on from that original 55, our approach has always been well. If we're going to introduce new colors, let's make sure they're colors we know our customers will love. So, so far every new color we've introduced has been crowdsourced or with some sort of crowdsource feedback from our customers. So they'd either voted on the colors, or with our most recent set of colors, we did a march madness style paint playoffs bracket. The predictions from the customers ultimately dictated which colors ended up in our palette. The two newest colors that we launched were actually a part of the original, like our paint playoffs from last year where we ended up introducing a blue and a green, but there was also a pink and a yellow, but that were super popular. So we introduced those after the new year, this year in 2021. That's always core to us is making sure that we include our customers in the process. And then another core part of our color differentiation is that we're designer curated. So even the colors that our customers helped choose were sort of pre-vetted by me through my interior designer lens. Our original 55 colors were curated by me.I think in the future, there might be some collaboration opportunities with other designers to kind of maintain that voice of authority of being interior designer-curated colors. But I think that having that expertise behind the color palette, as well as input from customers to ensure they'll love the colors really helps to take the guesswork out of the process, and again, give people less choice, but the best choice, right? So really just simplifying those decisions for the customer to help them get to faster decisions, because that's another terrible thing about the paint industry is because there's so much choice. People get paralyzed and it actually takes them a really long time to make a decision, and the buying journey can be really, really long.Fabian Geyrhalter: Yeah, absolutely. Looking back, because I thought your company was founded 2017, but that's I think when you just started laying the groundwork, and really it's a very young brand.Nicole Gibbons: Yeah.Fabian Geyrhalter: What was that one big breakthrough moment where you felt like, "Okay, we are moving from startup into brand right now." What was that one moment? It could have been a seed funding or Series A, could have been a moment that you had with a customer where you felt like they totally get it, it could be sales figures, whatever. What was that moment where you set back and you're like, "Wow, this was a special moment."Nicole Gibbons: Honestly, I think it was the Daily Launch because I had spent probably almost two years at that point, a whole year just thinking about the idea and then another year actually putting that idea into making that idea a reality, and raising capital, and then building behind the scenes all before we launched to the public.So on the day that we launched, we had a tremendous amount of press coverage and the media really got it and described our brand relative to the competitors in the market. I think really captured well how we stood out. And then immediately the customer feedback was super validating. And kind of like the quote that you read from the customer, we heard that kind of thing since day one. "This has been the best easiest paint shopping experience I've ever had. I'm never going back to the Big Box store again." That kind of thing, we heard from the very beginning.Again, are we doing everything perfectly? Probably not. Still a ton of room for improvement, but the basic premise and the basic problem that we set out to solve, I think immediately was validated that we were solving a real problem and creating a much better experience than what these brands who have been around for 200 years have not been able to create. I think we're super proud of that.We're still at what feels like in the beginning of our journey. So there's a lot more room we have in the works to continue improving upon the paint shopping experience, but I think we're off to a great start.Fabian Geyrhalter: You might be surprised, but I never heard that answer. And I asked that question pretty much on every show, because I think it's so interesting, but usually it's not right when you launch, and usually it's when you launched it, you get some good customer feedback, but that the press was immediately so interested because they themselves knew here is a category that hasn't been disrupted yet, and that hasn't been done in the right way. I remember fast company said the Warby Parker of paint is here, right? So it very, very quickly happened that the press led this conversation, which is, I mean, that's the biggest success you can have if that happens immediately upon launch, because then you know everyone will see a need for this. So that's really great.Well, on the flip side, was there any brand fail that you went through where you felt like, "My God, we just did a huge [inaudible]," and maybe something that listeners can learn from?Nicole Gibbons: Yeah. I don't know if it's so much of a brand fail as more of a business fail or a general marketing fail. We so far, thankfully, have not had any major snafus with our brand voice or anything like that, but we're going through this really painful experience right now in that when we launched, I didn't have a technical background. I'm a very non-technical founder. So I hired a super talented team of people who were great designers to build our website. But at the time, without knowing then what I know now, we built an overly complex custom website. We're a small team. We don't have any in-house developers. So it requires a lot of resources to maintain our website.Then on top of that, I think the architecture wasn't as clean as it could be and it has just created so many problems for us. So two and a half years in we're actually re-platforming our website fully onto Shopify, which is such a great e-commerce platform. Especially when we had zero customers, in general, with MVP, you kind of start small and grow from there, but we came out the gate with this super custom website that looked beautiful, but behind the scenes is just kind of really messy and complicated and it just creates a lot of backend pain points. So we're going through that process right now to re-platform. It's a big undertaking. Actually, I feel like it's more work to re-platform the site than it is to build a brand new site from scratch, because there's more that can go wrong.When we originally built our site, we didn't have any customers yet. Now we have hundreds of thousands of people that visit our website and we don't want to disrupt that experience or lose functionality that was there before. So there's just way more room for errors with this kind of next go around. Yeah, it's taking up a lot of time that we didn't intend to be spending.So I would say launch your brand on Shopify, because you're going to learn everything you need to learn. Maybe when you get to a certain scale, you can go custom, but that was a big lesson learned in what I would consider somewhat of a failed, because I just didn't know better and we just spent way too much developing and building the site that we have that doesn't actually function the way we need it to.Fabian Geyrhalter: Well, and you come from an interior design background. So of course, the design is most important in the beginning, right? And so one thinks. Think about tens of thousands of people starting shopping on Clare.com immediately, but since you're successful, that happens next. So I think it's extremely important that you talk about something which some people might not think is important. It can be extremely disruptive to a business. I work with an agency that does a lot of Shopify websites. For them, it's the exact same customer that keeps coming back to them. They created it in a different environment, then everything was really clunky. And then it becomes ... I mean, we're talking about a lot of money being spent when you have to redo a site in Shopify.Nicole Gibbons: Yeah.Fabian Geyrhalter: This is important.Nicole Gibbons: It's a young startup, so cash is king, so to make a costly mistake is really painful. This is definitely a very costly learning experience.Fabian Geyrhalter: Yeah. No, totally. Like you said, it's not necessarily a brand fail, and it's not necessarily fail period, because it's just kind of like, it's that whole fail forwards ideas. It was a logical thing to do, to do a site that just looks good.Since this is a branding podcast, I love having my guests always answer this one question, and it's not an easy one, what is one word that can describe your brand? If you literally think about your brand inside out, the culture, what you stand for, your customer, your offering, if you would put it all through a funnel, and outcomes one or two words of like, this is what we stand for, what would it be for you?Nicole Gibbons: I would say inspiring. That's a word that I think permeates every aspect of our brand experience and how we hope that our customers perceive us from the shopping experience. That is a world of difference from that cluttered aisle and a hardware store in full of inspiration to how the brand engages with us on social media. We want to be there to guide them and there to inspire them, to create a beautiful home that they'll love coming home to every day, and in our color assortment in just our overall brand voice. We want people to walk away feeling inspired by Clare. So that would be the one word that I'd say sums up-Fabian Geyrhalter: I love it.Nicole Gibbons: ... everything we're about.Fabian Geyrhalter: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Now that we talk about branding, and I've warmed you up, what does branding mean to you? I mean, obviously you lived in the world of branding all your professional life in one shape way or the other. You were in Internet Kiehl's, then there was the Victoria Secret job, and then you're running your own service company really as interior design. So I think you've seen a lot of different facets. What does branding mean to you?Nicole Gibbons: That's a good question. I think it can mean many things, but if I had to simplify it, it's creating an aesthetic that could be translated into a lifestyle. I think of Clare very much as a lifestyle brand, but also everything I did before in my career ultimately was around building a lifestyle. So I think in the world of e-comm consumer, you can't just be a nameless, faceless brand because right anyone can create a logo and a tagline, and come up with a name and call it branding. But I think it's truly branding when what you've set out to achieve is absorbed by your customers and that your customers actually relate to, and your customers can derive value from. So that's kind of a little bit of a long-winded answer, but that would be what I think of as branding and what I think creates a successful branding.Fabian Geyrhalter: I absolutely agree with you. Yeah. It's like there's the foundation, which everyone needs a logo, and a name, and colors, and all of that good stuff, but that doesn't make a brand. That's important to have, but what makes a brand is really the soul of it. And that might start with the founder who injects it into the company, or it might be certain principles, or a greater purpose.Nicole Gibbons: Yeah.Fabian Geyrhalter: I'm glad that you said that. Absolutely.Nicole Gibbons: It can't just be some abstract thing. It really has to resonate.Fabian Geyrhalter: What's a piece of brand advice for founders? Maybe even commerce founders, as a takeaway from what you learned besides starting on Shopify, obviously, but from a brand perspective, is there anything that you can advise the next generation of founders on?Nicole Gibbons: Yeah. I would say focus on experience, you know. I mean, even from the school of Jeff Bezos, but something that I can attest to within Clare is, if you can continuously deliver a delightful experience for your customer, that is what's going to propel your brand forward.Fabian Geyrhalter: Absolutely. Absolutely. What's next for Clare besides potentially looking at the impersonal retail experience, which I kind of pulled out of you? I'm sorry if you didn't mean to talk about that, but what are you really excited about with Clare for the next, I don't know, six months, a year?Nicole Gibbons: Yeah. I mean, six months, I think in the world of startups still is kind of forever, but just thinking about new products and how we can continue to deliver more for our customers. So we have some exciting things in the pipeline there. Obviously, I touched on this new website that we're in the process of building, which aesthetically will probably look quite similar to our current site, but hopefully, we'll deliver a better just overall experience. So I think that's like a top, top priority that's going to take us even through Q2 and have some cool partnerships in the works. So creating opportunities to reach more customers, but also without giving away too much. But yeah, just creating a cool opportunity for us to get in front of new audiences and things like that. So, yeah, I'd say in the short term, those are the key things that we're most excited about.Fabian Geyrhalter: Very cool. Where can listeners learn about Clare and start painting the walls on you?Nicole Gibbons: Yeah. Well, visit us at Clare.com, spelled CLARE. You can also follow us on social at Clare Paint, and we hope to see you soon.Fabian Geyrhalter: Thank you so much for taking the time to be on hitting the marketing call. We really appreciate it.Nicole Gibbons: Thanks so much. Thanks for having me.