The Enablers
Dava Guthmiller (and Noise 13). Needless to say, we love Dava's (and her team of Jane, Kyle, Meb and XiaoXiao) designs for the brand, the site and the packaging. But before creating ALL of our branding, she was one of the first to believe that we could actually pull this off. That there was a "there there”. Thank you.Suzi Sheffield (and Beautiful Briny Sea). We met Suzi through a chance encounter (her mom lives next-door to Parker’s auntie). What a blessing. She is helping get everything ready for production and showing us how to do it all.
The Guides
These people provide the very best information on how to create, grow and run a DTC brand. They are guides and relentless cheerleaders.
Nik Sharma - His Sunday newsletters, tweets and podcasts are just a fountain of practical wisdom about starting and scaling. Every week is a new case study filled with ideas from exceptional practitioners.
Web Smith - the guru of DTC. Those three weekly emails are not just full of immediately applicable nuggets, they're also implicitly a "you could do this too".
Taylor Holiday and Common Thread Collective - These guys are some of the best thinkers in the world on growth marketing. Even more impressive, they are committed to sharing it all. I've got an entire Twitter list following everybody at CTC - I learn something new every time I check it. Maybe someday we can (afford to) work with them.
Kevin Lee - Kevin is mentioned above, but worth mentioning again because of his commitment to building in public. Those podcasts are worth their weight in gold.
Kristen LaFrance - Krispy LePants is the world's biggest cheerleader for DTC brands. Her tweet stream is a constant reminder of the importance of relationships. Like her podcast, the communities that she pulls together are warm, supportive and full of information.
Most of all, we’d like to thank So and Chang Kim, Hae-Sin’s parents. Their quiet 50-year stewardship of the family salt farm and belief in its deliciousness was the biggest inspiration of all.
Hae-Sin and Parker