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SPEAKER_04: We had this seven-foot tall, very beautiful wood floor standing fixture, the laser cut logo. We spent a ton of money on it. And our idea was, this is the display you're going to use in your golf shop. But people would look at that display and just like go on, what are you thinking? We don't need, we can't put that in our shop. We would never sell that much product. They just weren't interested. And Jeff's like, this isn't working. We got to pull the plug and we got to go get real jobs.
SPEAKER_05: Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built. I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how Curran and Jeff Danderan took a gamble on men's skincare and managed to build a $100 million brand, Jack Black.
SPEAKER_05: The men's skincare market is a tough one to crack. It's a tiny fraction of the overall skincare market. Guys just don't spend much time moisturizing or exfoliating their faces. They might shave or use shampoo and soap in the shower, and that's it. But that's slowly changing. Between 2018 and 2021, sales of men's prestige skincare brands grew by 21%. And part of that growth has to do with a brand called Jack Black. It's a brand that was designed specifically to appeal to men. Blue colored tubes, labels that look like cigar brands, even the name Jack Black sounds like a rugged dude in a bourbon appreciation society. The name, by the way, was picked before the actor Jack Black was well known. Anyway, when Curran Danderan founded the company with her friend Emily Dalton in 2000, almost no one wanted to touch men's personal care, in part because it was and still is dominated by the big players like Gillette. But the other reason is that some of the prestige brands like Clinique and Shiseido already had men's skincare lines that weren't really flying up the shelves at department stores. But Curran had a hunch that if she could redesign men's skincare, make it appeal to men in, say, Texas, she might be able to break through. And that's what Jack Black did. They would lure guys to department store counters and give them samples to take home. And over time, it won them over. Early on, Curran recruited her husband Jeff to help with sales. And it took many years before they managed to eke out a small profit. Today, Jack Black is owned by Edgewell. It's a company that also owns brands like Shik and Playtex. The co-founders sold the company in 2018 and made a hefty return. We'll get there. Curran grew up in Florida and went to college at Vanderbilt. Jeff grew up in Indiana and went to college at the University of Mississippi. They met in Dallas after they both graduated. Jeff was working as an executive recruiter, and Curran was working in market research at Mary Kay Cosmetics.
SPEAKER_04: I thought that cosmetics would be fun and exciting and creative. I really wanted to be creative. I didn't have any experience in cosmetics. I was a minimal user of cosmetics at the time, but it had all the ingredients of a product category that I thought I would be good at and enjoy.
SPEAKER_05: And explain what, I mean, for people who aren't familiar with it, Mary Kay, basically, it's a old school direct-to-consumer company, right? It's a direct marketing company. Direct selling. Exactly. Direct selling. And basically, so they don't sell in stores. You've got an army of independent entrepreneurs, mostly women, who sell cosmetics to their friends door-to-door at parties, right?
SPEAKER_04: Right. And so you would have a hostess and you would sell to a group of the hostess's friends. And I moved up very quickly, so it was very stimulating and challenging and rewarding for me. They were growing like crazy. So it was very fast-paced. It was a good life. I loved my job, but I had a good social life. I was dating a lot. I wasn't married. I didn't have kids, didn't have that responsibility.
SPEAKER_05: And at the same time, you decided to do an MBA, I guess, sort of at night or part-time? Right.
SPEAKER_04: At night and on the weekends. It took three years.
SPEAKER_05: Okay. So, Jeff, I know that you were in Dallas around the same time as Curran, working as an executive recruiter. Correct. Yeah. Okay. And Curran, you're sort of working your way up at the time at Mary Kay. So tell me, how did the two of you meet? What do you remember?
SPEAKER_04: Well, we met at the downtown YMCA. I was doing aerobics. Right. It was back in the Jane Fonda aerobics days. He was playing basketball, and he sent some friends over that were mutual friends that I knew. And they asked me if I would be interested in going out with him. And I said, well, what does he look like? And we peeked over the basketball court, and they pointed to him. And I'm like, yeah, he's good looking. I'll go out with him.
SPEAKER_03: And she started walking towards me. And I was just so nervous. I was just like, do you want to go out? And she said, yeah, I'll go out. And I just thought, man, this girl is just beautiful. And you were like, I'm never going to go for me. I was just thinking I'm way above my program here. Yeah.
SPEAKER_05: Out of my league. Yeah. Out of my league. I'm like a goofy dude playing basketball. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03: I've got an afro and long hair. Well, and he had this super shiny suit on that was like too short.
SPEAKER_04: So bad style on top of it. It was like above his ankle.
SPEAKER_04: First impressions weren't so great.
SPEAKER_05: But you agreed. You guys weren't on a date. And how did that date go, Corrine?
SPEAKER_04: Well, I didn't think it went very well. He talked about himself the entire night. He went into minutia detail about how he keeps an index card filing system about all his recruiting prospects and how he works that system. He got up several times to go use the payphone. Wow. He never asked me what my job was, where I was from. This is promising. Yeah. This is going to be a long and fruitful relationship.
SPEAKER_05: Never going out with this guy again. That's one and done. And Jeff, how did the day go for you?
SPEAKER_03: Well, I was living with my brother at the time and he asked me, he said, how did that day go? I said, it went great. I said, I'm going to marry that girl.
SPEAKER_05: Had you had insight into her thinking you would never have thought that?
SPEAKER_03: No, I would have been very disappointed for sure. So Corrine, why did you agree to go out with him a second time if he was boring and talking
SPEAKER_05: about index cards on the first date?
SPEAKER_04: Well, he was so persistent and this is a trait that really benefited us at Jack black. Many years later, he did not take rejection. He didn't take no. And so finally he wore me down and I went out with him again and he started being a little more interesting and having a conversation, two way conversation. Wow. And then he lied and he said, I want a trip to Mexico. I'd like to take you with me. And I said, no, about 10 times. Finally he wore me down.
SPEAKER_05: Wait, sorry. Pause. Jeff, you made up a story about winning a contest. I wouldn't say I lied.
SPEAKER_03: I'd say that I bended the truth a little bit. We were talking about a sales trip at our company. I just decided it was going to be Cancun, Mexico and that I had won that trip.
SPEAKER_05: Okay, I got you. You were going to engineer this trip. So eventually you convinced her to go to Cancun with you. And you agreed, Corrine. You agreed to go.
SPEAKER_04: Yes. And that was the turning point. Then I started to fall in love with him and things changed after that.
SPEAKER_05: All right. So you guys become a couple and then a few years later, I think in 1989, maybe you get married and start a family. And you were kind of climbing the ranks at Mary Kay. And tell me what you were doing there. Tell me about your job.
SPEAKER_04: When we got married, I was director of marketing. And then a couple of years after we got married, we had our son. And then by the time we had our daughter, two years after that, I was executive VP of global marketing and business development. So I was over product development marketing for the entire world, many countries. And they were public when I joined. And the owners, which were Richard Rogers and Mary Kay, Ash decided to take it private. And so that was an important milestone for the company. And it also afforded me some phantom share options that they granted to key people, which I was later able to use to help fund Jack Black startup. Corrine, tell me about the culture at Mary Kay.
SPEAKER_05: I mean, now you were sort of rising up the ranks and eventually as you're in your late 30s, you're getting into the executive suite there into late 30s. And you basically started there when you were 22. So you were a lifer. You were a lifer. Right. What was the culture like there?
SPEAKER_04: Well, I think towards the end of the time I was there, it got very political, more bureaucratic. I felt like I was solving the same problems over and over. And then they brought in a new CEO that I didn't think had the chops or the experience or the knowledge of the business. And I just felt like it was time for me to move on.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah. Did you have ambitions to be the CEO?
SPEAKER_04: Yes. Yeah. I wouldn't want it to be given to me, but if I was the best candidate and I had earned it, yes, I wanted it.
SPEAKER_05: When you decided to leave Mary Kay in 1998, that must have been a difficult decision. First of all, you guys were not independently wealthy. I mean, Jeff had a job and money coming in and you had some shares, but it wasn't enough to stop working for the rest of your life. So that must have been a difficult decision.
SPEAKER_04: Yeah. And I was a major breadwinner. And Jeff was very distraught at my decision and I pretty much decided I'm leaving, but I didn't know exactly what my next move was going to be. I just knew I had to do it.
SPEAKER_05: Jeff, when she made that decision, I mean, of course, I'm assuming you were supportive of your husband, but were you worried about that?
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I was. And when she started talking about leaving and she would tell me she was very upset and she didn't want to be there anymore, I would try to talk her into staying. I was able to do that for maybe six to nine months before she finally left.
SPEAKER_05: Right. And now, Jeff, the pressure is a little bit on you because you've got this whole paycheck coming in. Well, my job was straight commission.
SPEAKER_03: I was basically month by month having no idea what I was going to get paid that month or make anything that month. Because if you didn't place people in jobs, you didn't get anything.
SPEAKER_05: Correct. So you were constantly having to hustle, constantly having to sell. Yeah. So that's going on. And, Curran, you're out of Mary Kay. And what did you start to do? I mean, did you start to have conversations with people? Or did you completely stop thinking about work for a while?
SPEAKER_04: No, I just knew I was going to keep working. It wasn't like I was going to retire. But I was starting to realize, hey, I don't want to go back to the corporate world. I want to do something different. I want to be in control of my destiny. I want to be in control of who I work with and how I run the business. And then the turning point was, after I had resigned from Mary Kay, several of the key marketing people that worked for me also resigned. And one of those top performers was Emily Dalton, who eventually was the co-founder of Jack Black with us. And we had lunch and she said, why don't we start a business together? I'm like, well, what are you thinking? And she's like, well, it's got to be in cosmetics because that's what we know. I'm like, right? Sure. And she's like, what about men?
SPEAKER_05: What about men? She said.
SPEAKER_04: Men, yeah. Like cosmetics for men. Yeah. I'm like, what? I'm like, no, that is such a small, non-existent market because people had tried it. Mary Kay tried it. It was like 0.1% of their business. And she's like, no, men are changing. Nobody's doing it. Somebody is going to figure it out. Let's pursue it. Let's think about it.
SPEAKER_05: So when the two of you started, because it's exciting that conversation, that first conversation gets your blood pumping and you're like, wait a minute, maybe there's something here. But when you started talking, I mean, was the conversation around cosmetics for men like concealer and things like that for men or was it? Never.
SPEAKER_04: It was never cosmetics. It was skincare, grooming, head to toe care for your body.
SPEAKER_05: So personal, like what we call personal care.
SPEAKER_04: Yeah. Functional products like deodorant, antiperspirant, shave cream, but then moisturizers, sunscreen, a brand that was luxury because you had the mass market grooming brands like Gillette and then the prestige market, you had fragrances, but you did not have a complete line of skincare that was positioned at the luxury end of the market. Targeting more affluent guys, luxurious textures that didn't exist.
SPEAKER_05: So what did you do? I mean, did you go home and start to talk to Jeff about this?
SPEAKER_04: Well, Emily and I talked amongst ourselves extensively. We were both marketing people, so we're putting together tear sheets and imagery and crafting the brand personality. And we knew we had to do almost everything totally different than the women's brands were doing to break through to men. Our insight was that that's why it had failed before. Right.
SPEAKER_05: Because it was like, there was Clinique for men. And I remember, and I think it's still around, but it just looks like Clinique for women, but just as Clinique for men. And that didn't quite work.
SPEAKER_04: Totally. So they basically cost reduced their women's formulas, put it in stock gray packaging and put it on the shelf with the women's stuff and never supported it. So we were busy brainstorming, okay, what is our strategy? How are we going to make this work when so many others have failed?
SPEAKER_05: Why don't we come back in just a moment, how Curran comes up with the name Jack Black, and why Jeff takes their first display case for showcasing the product and winds up smashing it into bits. Stay with us. I'm Jeff Ross and you're listening to How I Built This. 90% of startups fail. 90%! Just 10 out of every 100 last. In order to succeed, startups need grit, talent and the ability to perform at the highest level. That's where Mercury comes in. Mercury is banking engineered for the startup journey. A modern solution to help your company become the best version of itself. To eliminate the hurdles that come with traditional banking. To offer a product crafted to help you scale with safety and stability. To go beyond banking and provide access to the foremost investors, operators and tools. Because when you can operate with confidence, building your company becomes an art form. Join over 100,000 companies banking with Mercury at Mercury.com. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group and Evolve Bank and Trust. Members FDIC. If you're an entrepreneur growing your own business, then you've probably experienced times when it took forever to close the books. Maybe you have too many manual processes and the things that you used to do in a day are now taking a week. If this is you, you should know these three numbers. 36,025,1. 36,000. That's the number of businesses which have upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle. 25. NetSuite turns 25 this year. That's 25 years of helping businesses do more with less, close their books in days, not weeks, and drive down costs. And one, because your business is one of a kind. So you get a customized solution for all of your KPIs in one efficient system with one source of truth. Manage risk, get reliable forecasts, and improve margins. Everything you need all in one place. Right now, download NetSuite's popular KPI checklist designed to give you consistently excellent performance absolutely free at NetSuite.com slash built. That's NetSuite.com slash built to get your own KPI checklist. NetSuite.com slash built. One more thing before we get back to the show. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show. And it's totally free. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's the late 1990s and Kern Danderand and her colleague from Mary Kay, Emily Dalton, are brainstorming ways to launch a brand of skincare products for men. And it turns out that their first tough pitch meeting isn't with investors. Instead, they have to convince Kern's husband, Jeff.
SPEAKER_03: I was out playing golf one day and I came in through our garage to our family room and Kern and Emily had all the things that she talked about out on our tables. And I said, well, what are you guys doing? And they said, well, we're thinking about starting a company. And I said, well, what kind of company? And they said, well, we're going to start a skincare company for men. I said, that's a crazy idea. You know, guys don't care about skincare. I said, where are you going to get the money? They said, we're going to use our money. That's even a crazier idea. But then they spent a little bit of money on doing some market research where they talked with men about skincare, what they used, how they used it. We got those reports back a couple of weeks later. I was reading the reports one evening in bed and I thought, you know what? They're really onto something here.
SPEAKER_04: Yeah. So we did focus groups and we basically presented our brand concept, which was rugged masculinity, but there was a luxury and a polish about it. So we showed different pictures of celebrities, Tom Landry, Steve McQueen. These are the kind of guys that this brand is for. And men really liked that. One of our inspirations was to have our packaging kind of be inspired by liquor labels and cigar labels, which are kind of timeless and cool and interesting. And they liked that. And so we got positive feedback. Yeah, I'd be receptive. I'd like to know more. All right.
SPEAKER_05: So you decide that you're going to jump into this and tell me about how you're going to finance it.
SPEAKER_04: Well we did want to raise money. We spent a lot of time putting together a very beautiful business plan. This is you and Emily. Me and Emily.
SPEAKER_05: Because Jeff is still working. He's still recruiting. Yeah.
SPEAKER_04: He's involved on the periphery. He's aware of it, but he's still working. We had to have some income coming into our family. So we networked with people we knew that were connected to investors and we sent out a bunch of business plans. We got mostly crickets. Nobody even bothered to respond. The one response we did get was, I'll pass. This won't work.
SPEAKER_05: I'm just surprised because both of you had come to the table with such deep experience in the industry. It wasn't like you were just out of college with this pie in the sky. We were pretty cocky.
SPEAKER_04: You know, we're like, okay, this business plan is going to wow them. They're going to see the potential. We just got total thumbs down, just not even the courtesy of a response. And I look back and I don't know exactly why we kept going. We were totally undeterred. And we're just like, okay, well, we'll fund it ourselves. And which in hindsight, I'm so grateful because we had total control. We had no outside investors.
SPEAKER_05: And you had a little bit of a nest egg from your time at Mary Kay. Correct. How much money did you have to use?
SPEAKER_04: Close to half a million.
SPEAKER_05: Was that pretty much everything you had?
SPEAKER_04: Yeah. Wow. And Jeff, at this point, Jeff got laid off from his recruiting job. Around this time? Yes. So Jeff was on board because then there was three founders, three co-founders.
SPEAKER_05: And Jeff, from what I understand, the company where you were working, I guess their business really started to slow down. And so there just wasn't much recruiting for you to do at that point and you were laid off, right? Correct. Yeah. But can I just ask kind of where your head was at the time? Because I mean, you'd read the surveys and research that Curran and Emily had done and you thought that was encouraging, but still, like you did not now, you didn't have a steady income and Curran was going to put in all of your money into this business, which was a huge risk. I mean, were you worried about that?
SPEAKER_03: Yeah. I mean, I would...
SPEAKER_05: Because you guys were like 40 years old. Forty years old. Forty, yeah. I mean, that's...
SPEAKER_03: Well, I thought the numbers, the business plan they put together was very achievable. And I thought, gosh, we're going to be killing it in five years because the numbers supported a hugely successful company in five years. The projections. Yeah, projections.
SPEAKER_05: Right. But the projections are numbers. Yeah. The projections are projections.
SPEAKER_04: Yeah. We didn't even make our projections.
SPEAKER_03: We didn't even come close to that. But the reality was that I just didn't think about us not being successful.
SPEAKER_05: And it was sort of like this incredible stroke of luck that you lost your job at this time. I mean, of course, at the time, I probably didn't feel that way. But Emily and Curran had expertise in marketing and in product, but not in sales. You were a sales guy. They needed a salesperson. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03: And I talked to Emily and Curran about helping them with sales and developing a database for us to contact golf country club buyers all over the country.
SPEAKER_05: And these were for golf shops. You thought golf shops on golf courses. Yeah. This is smart because that's a tribe and Jeff is a golfer, right, Jeff? Right. You're a good golfer. That's right.
SPEAKER_03: Okay. And so, I mean, we really thought that this golf club strategy of distribution would be a very strong one.
SPEAKER_04: Yeah. When we first started the company, we were more thinking we're going to focus on sunscreens. Yeah. But then we're also going to add on things like shave cream and hand cream, lip balm. Because we're thinking, well, the men, they're playing golf every weekend. They're not going to the mall. So let's reach them where they're going. We're trying to be innovative in our distribution.
SPEAKER_05: And Curran, was Emily at all nervous? Like, oh, your husband coming in. Like, was there any of that weirdness? Yeah.
SPEAKER_04: Yeah. She had some advisors, some lawyers that were like, you don't want to get involved with the married couple. Like what if that goes off the rails? Yeah. And also, with Jeff and I combined, if we voted against her, we could go, hey, we just want this whole thing for ourselves. We're kicking you out. Yeah. But she trusted us and believed in the concept and she moved forward. But we did have to talk through that.
SPEAKER_05: And tell me about the name. How did you, how did you, cause you didn't initially didn't have a name. You just said concept. Right. Yeah. Tell me more about that.
SPEAKER_04: Well, I actually came up with the name. I was on a flight. I had a yellow legal pad and I just wrote down Jack Black. I liked the strength of that name, the simplicity of it, the timelessness. It felt very masculine and it could have authority over a lot of different product categories. It wasn't so narrow, like the art of shaving or you're just body or you know, you're just sunscreen.
SPEAKER_05: And you wanted the name of a person because...
SPEAKER_04: Because I wanted the guys to relate to it. Like it's their buddy and they're not embarrassed at all to say, I use Jack Black. Yeah. Or I use something that I can't pronounce or it's a French name or it's a girl's name.
SPEAKER_05: And Jack Black could be the person who started the company like Vidal Sasson or you know, like it's Jack Black. It's my company.
SPEAKER_04: Just a very strong, rugged, masculine, athletic guy.
SPEAKER_05: You wanted like, maybe this is the best analogy, but you kind of wanted the Marlboro Man.
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, exactly. But not a smoker. Not smoking. Yeah. Yeah. Not smoking. And the big potential was getting the vast numbers of heterosexual guys that cared about how they looked, that worked out, spent money on their clothes, tried to eat right, get them to use skincare. Right. Because it totally makes sense.
SPEAKER_05: All right. So you have this name, Jack Black. And by the way, just coincidentally, I mean, this is kind of before the actor Jack Black really blew up. I think High Fidelity, I can't remember when that came out, that was his first big role. Shortly thereafter. Like, yeah, we had already trademarked the name and locked into that and designed the
SPEAKER_04: packaging when he had his first movie.
SPEAKER_05: And God bless him, but he is not like the Marlboro Man. He's amazing. I love him. If he was here right now, I'd have a beer with him or a coffee. But he's not, I don't think of like rugged Americano when I think of the actor Jack Black.
SPEAKER_04: No, we would not have ever picked him to be our- He's Kung Fu Panda. He's a Kung Fu Panda. Yeah. So there was confusion in the early days and people were thinking he owned the company. And we'd get emails to our info at Get Jack Black, hey, Jack, I love your latest movie and I love your line. All right.
SPEAKER_05: So you've got this name and this brand. Now let's talk about the colors and the label. What did you do for that? Well, this was Emily's strength too.
SPEAKER_04: She was so good at design and everything was just meticulously crafted. The label and the overall design was more inspired by cigar labels and liquor, upscale craft liquor.
SPEAKER_05: It's a diamond shaped sticker. It looks like a sticker, but was it diamond shaped logo on top of a solid colored and the color was blue? Right.
SPEAKER_04: It was a royal blue. And at the time the men's lines were white, gray and brown.
SPEAKER_05: The competing lines you're talking about, competitors. Yes. Yeah.
SPEAKER_04: Were white, gray and brown. Yes. Okay. And we knew we had to have massive eye appeal to get men to notice it. So we liked the strength of the blue and the black together. Yeah. And then after we did the first focus groups, we didn't do any more research because we didn't have any money. So we're just, this is all gut feel and instinct, but we settled on what we ended up going with and it's what we still market today. Yeah.
SPEAKER_05: All right. So you have the logo, you've got the name and you've got the money to get this out there. And I'm assuming you didn't build your own facility. You didn't have enough money for that, but there were contract manufacturers that you could presumably go to and pick out the ingredients and say, this is what we want. So did you already have relationships with some of those manufacturers through Mary Kay? We did.
SPEAKER_04: And we went to three different contract manufacturers that we had worked with at Mary Kay. So we knew the people and they were willing to work with us. And we, all the formulas were custom. We did test the formulas amongst different guys that we knew in the Dallas area and got really good feedback. So that was encouraging.
SPEAKER_05: And what kind of scents, what kind of smells were you going for?
SPEAKER_04: That's a good question because the aromas are so important for guys. And what we had found in the market was either they were super heavily fragranced or they were just not fragranced at all. So we really took approach the approach of light aromas, not fragrance. There was a lot of eucalyptus and peppermint, very fresh kind of tingly spa like fragrances. And the other thing in the formulations that we focused on where the textures men really object to heavy, greasy, kind of occlusive feelings. So the products were very sheer and light and didn't weigh heavy on the skin, which was important.
SPEAKER_05: All right. So 2000, you launched the brand. The idea is you're going to be in golf stores. So you have, you know, a few hundred thousand dollars worth of product, right, that you've ordered. And what are you going to do from there? Like, how are you going to start? How are you going to get people to notice? How did you decide to like launch this product? Well, we decided to debut at the 2000 PGA show in Orlando, which is a massive show,
SPEAKER_04: like 30,000 people attend.
SPEAKER_05: This is like, presumably one of the biggest golf. It's in the world, biggest in the world. Okay. So you're preparing for this show. And you know, you need to get the word out. There probably aren't going to be too many personal care products shown there. So what did you do?
SPEAKER_04: So Jeff had meticulously compiled a list of what was it like 5000? Yeah, it was about 5000 golf country clubs, resort clubs all over the country.
SPEAKER_03: And then when I got laid off, I just spent my whole day calling country clubs and making sure that the database that we were putting together had the right address and the right buyers name, email address, follow up phone number, and then the mailer. Right, Karen?
SPEAKER_04: Yeah. So we designed this mailer that featured our product line, beautiful photography, and we mailed it out to all these 5000 buyers that Jeff had carefully researched. And we didn't design the mailing panel correctly. And the post office read the return address as the ship to address. So all of them came like within two weeks later, three weeks later, like right before the show, we get them all back to the executive suite.
SPEAKER_05: So the mailers never got there. Never got there.
SPEAKER_04: So like nobody knew we were there. So that was the first sign it was going to be an interesting show. So you get to Orlando, this PGA trade show, you've got a booth there.
SPEAKER_05: And you show up and tell me about the show.
SPEAKER_04: Well it's massive. There's just people everywhere. We had terrible location for our booth. We're in the very last row at the very end of that row in the back corner, not even by a bathroom or anything. We had no traffic coming by. So we would kind of walk the aisles and grab people and bring them back and put the product on their hands.
SPEAKER_05: And what did your display look like? I mean, did you have all the products in, you know, all labeled and everything?
SPEAKER_04: Well we didn't have production yet. So we had lab samples, which were basically white tubes that were hand crimped by the lab. Okay. And then we had this seven foot tall, very beautiful wood floor standing fixture, the laser cut logo. We spent a ton of money on it. And our idea was this is the display you're going to use in your golf shop and it'll hold $4,000 worth of Jack Black product and doesn't it look beautiful.
SPEAKER_05: And you were going to provide that to whoever?
SPEAKER_04: If you ordered $4,000, you could get the free display.
SPEAKER_05: The wood display. Okay.
SPEAKER_04: So first of all, when we finally got a few people back there, we would, you know, take the tubes and get ready to let them feel the product. And the crimps would bust and shoot out the other end all over their shirts. So the crimps were busting everywhere. People would look at that display and just like go on. What are you thinking? We don't need, we can't put that in our shop. We would never sell that much sunscreen product or shave cream. They just weren't interested. They were there to look at the latest equipment, the latest golf balls, range finders, hats,
SPEAKER_03: clothing. Yeah.
SPEAKER_04: They just, the category, they're just like, I don't care. Yeah. I don't get it. And so finally, Jeff rounded up seven of his good friends in the Dallas Fort Worth area that were head pros at the various country clubs and brought them over and we got a sale, probably a pity purchase from each of them. So it was a big fail. All right.
SPEAKER_05: So this, I mean, you had to put your entire strategy was this tribe of people. We're golfers and golf courses. And did you ask yourself, what did I get wrong? What happened here?
SPEAKER_04: Yeah. I think we were starting to go, hmm, you know, we might need to expand and go to traditional retail, but we, after we left, I will say Jeff took that floor standing seven foot wooden display. He cracked it into a million pieces and put it in the dumpster. He was so mad. And then we went to the Orlando airport. We went to Chili's to have dinner before our flight. And Jeff's like, this isn't working. We got to pull the plug and we got to go get real jobs.
SPEAKER_05: Wow. Jeff, you're the guy who's like, was persistent in pursuing, never taking no for an answer. You're the guy that she was like, no, I'm not going to marry you. I'm going to date you. And you're like, no, come on. You're the one who says, let's pack this in.
SPEAKER_03: I was so discouraged by the lack of sales at that show. And Kern looked at me and said, no, when we get back to Dallas, you got to get on the phone and start making some calls to open up accounts. We have $450,000 worth of inventory coming in in March and April. And we need to start selling that. So I thought, OK, I've got a really strong database here. We did meet some people that seemed interested and found a couple independent reps. And I started talking to those reps about carrying Jack Black. And then I just got on the phone and cold called all day, literally all day.
SPEAKER_05: So you needed a different approach. You were not going to build a scalable brand through golf shops.
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, we didn't abandon golf. And Jeff continued to build golf. And we opened some really amazing accounts, which, you know, a few months later led to a great PR mention. So we opened. Was it Austin Country Club, Jeff?
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, Austin Country Club. Austin Country Club.
SPEAKER_04: The pro told Jeff that Matthew McConaughey was using our products and loved them.
SPEAKER_05: How he was buying it at the shop there. Yes, in the golf. So they said the golf pro there says Matthew McConaughey likes your stuff, but you didn't know that for sure.
SPEAKER_04: We just heard it through the pro. OK, so this was at the height of InStyle magazine. And there was all the celebrity features about what the celebs are using. So Emily was based in New York and she was really hitting the streets, you know, talking to the editors, trying to get some ink on Jack Black. And she landed a meeting with InStyle and she shared the Matthew McConaughey tidbit and they published it in September.
SPEAKER_05: Just a photo of him and then saying, hey, he likes Jack Black products.
SPEAKER_04: Right. And then they had a picture of the beard loop and the lip balm.
SPEAKER_05: Wow.
SPEAKER_04: And so that led to specialty stores calling us. We actually got inbound calls from people interested in taking our line, which was a first. And here's my question about that.
SPEAKER_05: She could have been totally lying. Like, she could have said, hey, Matthew McConaughey or Jack Nicholson. And they were just like, yeah, great. We'll run a story. Like, I'm amazed about that. I mean, because Matthew McConaughey probably doesn't read InStyle, but like he could have been flipping through it at the grocery store if he goes and had been like, what? Jack Black? First of all, what is Jack Black? Or he might have been like, how do they even know this? Right. They just ran with it.
SPEAKER_04: Well, that was back in the day. Back in 2000. That doesn't happen anymore. Doesn't happen anymore. You get sued. Yeah. Yeah. So the magazines, you know, they carefully do their diligence and all that. But back then it was very, very common. All right.
SPEAKER_05: So you have Matthew McConaughey maybe, maybe not using the product, but it doesn't matter. You're getting attention. And you, but you also knew through the disaster at Orlando that you had to probably start to look at retail shops. And so I guess the first big store was a Dallas department store, Stanley Korshak, is that what it's called? Yeah. So tell me about that approach. How did you get in there? Well, they just have one location, but it's super special store, very upscale, great selection
SPEAKER_04: of merchandise. And the buyer granted me a meeting and I presented the line. At that point, it was still in lab samples because we didn't have production. He took everything home and he tried it and he called back very quickly and he's like, I love your formulas. We'll take it. And we're like, oh my gosh, like that's great. And they immediately did well with it. They had good sell through and were reordering. And so we started really to focus on more traditional retailers, but to not abandon golf either though.
SPEAKER_05: And once you got into the stores, right, you still, the problem that you have was not, was far from being solved, which is the behavioral change. Because it reminds me, we did a story on the show about Guayaki Yerba Mate, right? And it's a big company now, but when they first started trying to get people to drink it, they're like, this tastes awful. It's bitter. What is this? And it took them like 20 years to kind of introduce it to people. It's still growing, but you're in Stanley Korshak. And then what? Don't you have to like show people how to use it and get men to start using it?
SPEAKER_04: Well they had really great salespeople that did a lot of consultation and personal service. But what we, when our eyes were really opened was when we opened Nordstrom, we pitched the guy in Dallas, his name was Mark Lance. He said he liked the formulas, but he wasn't sure it would work. You know, because retailers are very protective of their valuable real estate on the floor and they got to make sure you're going to sell. And so men's skincare was absolutely not proven and it was very risky for them. Finally he's like, okay, we'll bring you into Stonebriar. We'll test it.
SPEAKER_05: Stonebriar is a, where is that?
SPEAKER_04: It's in Frisco. Okay. That's where the Dallas Cowboys headquarters are. It's like the booming town. So they invited us to come to the grand opening of the store. It was the last minute invite. We could not get a babysitter. And so me, Jeff, and our two little kids went to the opening and I kind of manned our product and Jeff followed the chase, the kids around the mall. So I didn't sell anything, but I did see this woman making sale after sale. Her name was Elaine Syke and she's the best salesperson I've ever laid eyes on. Wow. And at the end of the night I went up to her and I introduced myself and we started talking and I'm like, well, we just started this line and would you be willing to work a few hours for us? And she, she agreed to give us five hours a week and she sold like crazy. She would pull guys over, start to talk to them, put the product on their skin, let them feel it, let them smell it and they would buy. So here's this, this model of how you educate guys and they would come back and reorder.
SPEAKER_05: What would she sell them? Shaving cream or? Well, our strategy was guys understand shave product.
SPEAKER_04: You hook them with just a superior shave cream. And that was our hero product. It was called Beard Lube. It was very unique. It was translucent. It had a lot of natural oils in it, had some skincare ingredients in it. So it was a great shave and it left your skin feeling really soft and silky.
SPEAKER_05: That was the gateway, the shaving cream.
SPEAKER_04: Yes. Okay. You would talk about the Beard Lube. They would say buy it. You'd give them a sample of the face buff, which is your cleanser and your scrub. Use this in the shower before you shave. It exfoliates, gets you a closer shave. And then you give them a sample of the post-shave cooling gel. After you're done shaving, put this on to cool the skin and gently hydrate. And so I saw at that moment, the power of what a great salesperson can do at the store level, what we had to invest in. You had to pull the guy in because he's not just walking up going, I'm looking for grooming products. You're walking by and you're literally chatting him up and pulling him from what he's doing and bringing him over to your area. And that's what we had to do. It was very time consuming and labor intensive, but you had to do that. That's how you get the behavior change, educating these guys one by one.
SPEAKER_05: When we come back after the break, how Jack Black shows up at Cowboy Stadium and the Super Bowl. For the rest of us, I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to how I built this.
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SPEAKER_05: Hey welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2002, two years after launching Jack Black and Curran, Jeff and Emily are shifting their initial strategy from selling to men in golf shops to selling to men in department stores. They're starting to get some traction hitting $2 million in annual sales. By the way, were your projections right? Is that what you had anticipated for 2002? Oh from the original?
SPEAKER_04: No we were way under. Way way under. I mean that business plan was bogus and off target from day one.
SPEAKER_03: We may have had at the end of year two $8 million in sales in our projections. It wasn't even close.
SPEAKER_05: And that's because you overestimated initially how big the market was going to be at that point.
SPEAKER_04: Yeah. And how much golf shops would sell.
SPEAKER_05: So let me ask about your relationship during this time because it's you know, yes you're growing and it looks good but still you know you're not I mean bringing $2 million in a year you guys were not making you're not profitable and I have to assume you guys had almost no salary at that point because you had to spend money on product. What was your relationship like? I mean was it stressful being married, raising kids and running the business? Like did you guys did you guys fight?
SPEAKER_04: Yes it was very very stressful and there was a lot of tension, a lot of pressure. We didn't pay ourselves for maybe four years, pay ourselves at all. And you know you're just you're struggling to survive and your family's all in on it right? Yeah. So we got through it but you've got to know what you're getting into. I advise other couples that are thinking about starting a business. It's going to really strain your marriage because you could disagree at work and have a heated discussion. If it's not your husband you come home and you don't have to see that person that you just had that big fight with. But when you're working with them there they are and you're still fighting when you get home from work and then you're fighting when you're back on the job and there's no escape.
SPEAKER_05: Jeff did you, I mean it sounds like you really, Kern was the CEO that you defer to her leadership or did you sometimes, I don't know, metal is maybe not the right word, did you sometimes question her leadership?
SPEAKER_03: No I never really questioned her leadership or Emily's. I mean they were just in my opinion extremely talented. And I mean I will say that my annual physical, my doctor who I'd known for many years asked me how things were going. I said, you know what, it's pretty tough. I said things at home are rough because we're working together, we're trying to build this business and he said, have you ever thought about going to therapy?
SPEAKER_03: And I said yeah, I have and he gave me the name of a therapist and Kern and I went for an hour visit and I thought it was pretty helpful and she said, your wife is really really smart and you need to stop arguing about the little things and save your ammunition for something that really matters. And I stopped that day, the next day I just said I'm not going to keep arguing about this little stuff and then a couple years later when we started really doing better and started paying ourselves more, I mean that helped a lot.
SPEAKER_03: Those two things helped a lot.
SPEAKER_05: I think you guys started to break even or maybe turn a slight profit in your maybe third or fourth year. Your sales were about $5 million that year. Did that ease the pressure a little bit?
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, I think you could breathe a little easier but I was still super conservative fiscally. We still didn't have a lot of money to spend and so I was very tight fisted about what we spent our money on and we had a saying that we're fabulously frugal, try to make it positive. We had really crappy offices, no trappings and flow coach, stayed in budget hotels and we would not spend money unless we knew it was going to drive sales because we were not out of the woods yet.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah. Well, and we were operating with a line of credit at that point that was expanding. I think initially it was 250 and it was 500 and then it became a million dollars and that was within five, six years of starting the business and of course there weren't any bankers that were going to give you that money without a personal guarantee. We'd have to take our stock portfolio and personally guarantee that to have the line of credit.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah. What about, I mean, of course you're still small even as you grew. You're growing every year which was impressive. By 2011 you hit $35 million in sales, so 11 years in, but still small compared to the overall cosmetics industry. Did that in a sense shield you from potential threats and competitors or did you already start to see the sharks circling saying, wait a minute, maybe they're onto something?
SPEAKER_04: Oh, yeah. It was just hyper competitive. Immediately. Oh my gosh. You had everybody from the big companies to the little startups to everybody in between because in the industry everybody's, it's pretty quick to copy something that's working well. There was a lot of competitors and it was even more brutal than the women's because the total size of the market was so much smaller, the space you were granted on the floor was smaller but yet there were so many more people wanting to get a piece of it. Some of them could be ruthless. They'd try to steal your employees, steal your customers. You'd have your space all set up and the next day you'd go into work and it was gone because your competitor moved it. There was just a lot of battles on the store floors.
SPEAKER_05: One of the things that you guys did, and I think it goes back to the golf strategy was you started to partner with NFL teams. Like you put your product in locker rooms so players could use them. You partnered with the Dallas Cowboys. You're in Dallas, America's team, right? Did that move the needle? Being in luxury suites at Cowboys Stadium or being in the locker rooms at NFL locker rooms, does that really matter? Does that make a difference?
SPEAKER_04: Well, it was hard to quantify but I do feel like it was a game changer for us. We first got into the NFL program through the Cowboys. The Joneses were building the new stadium and it was going to be the absolute epitome of luxury stadiums. Jerry Jones used Jack Black and we were invited to meet with them about putting our products in the luxury suites. We would co-brand the products. We'd change our labeling to include the Cowboy Star. Then we would also, in return for providing the products, we negotiated advertising in the stadium and on their website. Also we would do gifting to VIPs, which is a great way to sample. You're creating this relationship with the guy's favorite football team and that's a good combination for us and it's a positive aura for our brand.
SPEAKER_05: Tony Romo is using Jack Black. It's good enough for me.
SPEAKER_04: Or like the Cowboys like Jack Black. Wow, I'm going to check that out. The Super Bowl, I think it was in 2011, was at the Cowboy Stadium and all our products were in the suites and all the other NFL team owners and executives of course came to the game and they saw our products and we started getting so many phone calls from the other teams. We wanted to put your products in our suites. We want it to be co-branded with our Packers logo, with the Bears, whatever. We reached so many men that way that we wouldn't have otherwise reached.
SPEAKER_05: The growth really was organic, right? You just kind of cash flowed, grew. Once you were in Saks Fifth Avenue and Bloomingdale's and these big retailers, was it still a hustle? Jeff, did you still have to call people up and try to open accounts or did it get significantly easier? Well, the cold calling was obviously heavy for the first six or seven years and then
SPEAKER_03: from that point forward, I dealt with our independent sales reps who sold to gift stores, specialty shops, spas, men's clothing stores. I mean, it was a whole different category that no one else was going after either. We had at one point maybe six or seven hundred independent retail type stores that were selling Jack Black and I dealt with all the reps that were helping us open those types of accounts.
SPEAKER_05: When did you feel, Curren, that you were like, okay, I think we have crossed the threshold. Now we have done enough work where there's momentum in people understanding what these products are, how to use them.
SPEAKER_04: I think it would be around 2011, 12, so 10, 12 years into it. We're with the NFL teams. We have that great sports program. Our brand awareness was growing. We were number one with almost all our retailers. We had 35% share in the luxury category and we were the dominant leader. But I never felt like I could rest because there was always somebody trying to take you out. Yeah. There's so many competitors. So even to the point where we sold the company, every day I was still like fighting the good fight.
SPEAKER_05: Let me ask you about that because you did, of course, 2018, 18 years in, you were acquired by Edgewell and they're a pretty big personal care company. They paid you a significant amount of money for the brand. And I imagine 18 years in, you guys were exhausted. And so had you been looking for an out at that point?
SPEAKER_04: Yes. We actually, at that point, started a process with investment bankers to pursue selling the company. Emily had two small, they were in junior high, high school and she was ready to spend time with her kids. We'd worked so hard. Jeff was ready. I was getting there. I was the last one to finally say, hey, you know, it's time to retire. For Jeff and I, everything we had was tied up in the company. And so we had little liquidity at that point. So we just felt like it was time and we had grown the business to a good point. We had a great story to tell.
SPEAKER_05: And did you ever think about, I'm sure you were approached by like private equity groups or like, look, we'll buy a chunk of it. You can take money off the table and let's make this even bigger. Right.
SPEAKER_04: They would go, you have two bites of the apple. We weren't interested in that option. But we did talk to some private equity groups as part of the process.
SPEAKER_03: Prior to the actual hiring of an investment banker, two years prior to that, we were approached by a very significant player in the category. They made us an unsolicited non-binding offer that was, you know, very nice offer. And we spent nine months with them, giving them every detail of our business. They knew that they were the only ones bidding for our business. We provided them with details on new products, on how we sold, on the sales, on every store that we sold to. And two weeks prior to closing, they came into Dallas. We met at the Four Seasons Hotel. They probably had 40 people. I think we had five or six. And they said, you know that offer we made you nine months ago, non-binding? Well, our board can't get to that number. Oh, wow. I mean, basically the offer that we made, that number's off the table. We asked them, well, what do you have in mind? I mean, the number's X. What's the new number? And they just wouldn't give us a number. They just said, you're not going to be happy with it. And we were like, well, what is it? And then I asked them, I said, well, how much do you think you can grow our business by? We only think we can grow your business by 15 to 20%. I said, we can grow our business 15 to 20% without you. And it ended. I mean, it basically just stopped that day.
SPEAKER_05: And this is after you'd opened your entire data room to online books. For nine months.
SPEAKER_03: And what year was this? 2015, 2016.
SPEAKER_05: Wow. So they had new all-years trade secrets. They had everything.
SPEAKER_04: They had our formulas, everything. So we learned a very painful lesson. You need to have competition in your process.
SPEAKER_05: That must have been quite devastating. It really was.
SPEAKER_04: Oh, yeah. And you did not see it coming because they were just whining and dining and sweet talking.
SPEAKER_05: And it was non-binding. So they didn't have to pay a penalty or anything.
SPEAKER_03: Zero. So we waited a couple of years before we hired a banker to do it the right way. Do it all again.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah. You reportedly, Edgewell paid about $100 million for the brand. I don't know if that's accurate or not. That's been reported. But still, an amazing exit for a brand that you started in 2000. Once that happened, I think, Jeff, you left, right? You retired. I stayed for one year.
SPEAKER_03: I agreed to stay on for a year to help with the transition.
SPEAKER_05: Emily left right away. Or she left pretty soon after, right?
SPEAKER_04: Yeah. She left and we closed in January and she left in December.
SPEAKER_05: And you, Kern, you stayed for a while as an advisor up until like 2021, I think, right?
SPEAKER_04: Yeah. I was worried I would be bored because I've always been pretty much a workaholic. But when I did retire and I weaned myself from work because gradually reducing my hours that I was working after we sold the company. But I never had any girlfriends when I was working because it was just so all consuming. You had your work and then your kids. So I never had any friends. And now I've got time to have some good girlfriends, which I am enjoying. So it's been good.
SPEAKER_05: I mean, when you guys think about this journey and everything that led up to it, how much of it do you attribute to your work and how much do you think has to do with getting lucky? I mean, I've heard some luck in there. I mean, I think the fact that you got laid off, Jeff, was a little lucky. I felt that at the time. But what do you think, Jeff, first to you? I believe in luck.
SPEAKER_03: I'm a lucky guy. I was lucky to have met Curren. She changed my life. We were lucky to have Emily as our business partner. I think we were lucky to open some of the retailers that we opened. But also, you know, we worked extremely hard. You know, it seemed like we were always working. It just seemed like for 18 years there that we didn't have a lot of downtime. But we were lucky. I think we were very lucky.
SPEAKER_04: But if we hadn't been resilient and pivoted when we needed to and worked hard, then I think we wouldn't have capitalized on the luck. So you got to have, I guess, all of it firing on all cylinders.
SPEAKER_05: That's Curren and Jeff Danderand, co-founders of Jack Black. By the way, probably not a huge surprise here, but one of the company's most loyal customers is Jeff.
SPEAKER_03: I am not lying. I use probably 14 or 15 Jack Black products every day. Oh my gosh. Every day. When I take a shower, I use the body wash. I use the shampoo. I use the conditioner. I use the face buff in the shower. Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week.
SPEAKER_05: Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show. And as always, it's totally free. This episode was produced by Casey Herman with music composed by Ramtin Arablui. It was edited by Neva Grant with research help from Katherine Seifer. Our production staff also includes JC Howard, Sam Paulson, Remell Wood, Alex Chung, Kerry Thompson, Elaine Coates, John Isabella, Chris Masini, and Carla Estevez. I'm Guy Raz and you've been listening to How I Built This.
SPEAKER_05: Hey Prime members, you can listen to How I Built This early and ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today or you can listen early and ad-free with Wondery Plus and Apple Podcasts. If you want to show your support for our show, be sure to get your How I Built This merch and gear at WonderyShop.com. Before you go, tell us about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com slash survey. Hey, it's Guy here. And while we're on a little break, I want to tell you about a recent episode of How I Built This Lab that we released. It's about the company TerraCycle and how they're working to make recycling and waste reduction more accessible. The founder, Tom Zaki, originally launched TerraCycle as a worm poop fertilizer company. He did this from his college dorm room. Basically, the worms would eat trash and then they would turn it into plant fertilizer. Now, his company has since pivoted from that and they recycle everything from shampoo bottles and makeup containers to snack wrappers and even cigarette butts. And in the episode, you'll hear Tom talk about his new initiative to develop packaging that is actually reusable in hopes of phasing out single-use products entirely and making recycling and TerraCycle obsolete. You can hear this episode by following How I Built This and scrolling back a little bit to the episode, Making Garbage Useful with Tom Zaki of TerraCycle or by searching TerraCycle, that's T-E-R-R-A-C-Y-C-L-E, wherever you listen to podcasts.
