Ready to discover what drives a man to pursue the startup life, learn inside corporate America for over a decade, then lean back into the startup world? Join us as we engage in an enthralling conversation with Nelson Warley, co-founder of True Places. Learn how this visionary is redesigning the consumer goods space by pioneering an asset-light model. Nelson shares the inside scoop on the highs and lows of his intriguing journey - breaking free from the corporate shackles, facing down the hurdles of entrepreneurship, and employing invaluable lessons from his corporate years.
Fasten your seatbelts as we dive deeper into the True Places narrative. Experience the thrill of building a premium product - a high-end chair for outdoor use - and successfully filling a market gap. Nelson reveals the inspiration behind his brainchild and how a small, dedicated team and freelancers from across the globe are driving this dream. Listen closely as he sheds light on the intimate dynamics of his startup, the importance of embracing challenges and how he's shaking up conventions in the consumer goods industry. It's a journey you won't want to miss!
Ready to discover what drives a man to pursue the startup life, learn inside corporate America for over a decade, then lean back into the startup world? Join us as we engage in an enthralling conversation with Nelson Warley, co-founder of True Places. Learn how this visionary is redesigning the consumer goods space by pioneering an asset-light model. Nelson shares the inside scoop on the highs and lows of his intriguing journey - breaking free from the corporate shackles, facing down the hurdles of entrepreneurship, and employing invaluable lessons from his corporate years.
Fasten your seatbelts as we dive deeper into the True Places narrative. Experience the thrill of building a premium product - a high-end chair for outdoor use - and successfully filling a market gap. Nelson reveals the inspiration behind his brainchild and how a small, dedicated team and freelancers from across the globe are driving this dream. Listen closely as he sheds light on the intimate dynamics of his startup, the importance of embracing challenges and how he's shaking up conventions in the consumer goods industry. It's a journey you won't want to miss!
Welcome to the Third Growth Option Podcast, where we talk with business leaders and innovators hungry to drive growth that can be faster than internal organic growth and less risky than acquisition. Your moderator is Benno Duenkelsbuehler, chief Sherpa and CEO at (re)ALIGN, who has led private equity-owned distributors through turnarounds and growth. With battle-proven leaders from all frontiers, we want to provoke thinking about business growth beyond conventional wisdom and binary choices.
Speaker 2:Hey, I'm Benno, your host, talking today with Nelson Warley, co-founder of a direct-to-consumer startup called True Places since 2019. And before that, Nelson, you were with Campbell Soup Company for some 14 years as director of the innovation team and in various digital and e-commerce and roles and brand management roles and yet another digital marketing experience for startup doing or right after the dot-com bust right in 2000. That's right, yeah. Welcome to Third Growth Option podcast, nelson. Thanks, it's good to be here, Benno. I want to learn a little bit about your growth story, or stories, as you kind of navigated after your MBA into a startup in the early 2000s and then 14 years in corporate America, Fortune 500, company innovation, strategic stuff, and then jump back into co-founder of True Places. What gave you the nudge to walk away from that oh so cozy paycheck every other Friday, instead of taking money, you're spending money on inventory and building a website and all kinds of stuff where the money is going in the wrong direction for a while. That's right, yeah.
Speaker 3:There are times where I missed that cozy paycheck every couple of weeks. Yeah, I mean my story. I did not have a business background in college. I jumped into the startup world back then the dot-com world 20-plus years ago and did a little bit of everything. I really enjoyed that experience. You're right, I did then spend almost 15 years in the consumer packaged goods world and with Campbell Soup. I love the company, the people there. I think the benefit of a job like that is you're just exposed to so many different parts of a business and you get to lead teams and traditional brand management roles, but also opportunities in innovation. We had an opportunity to create an e-commerce team there.
Speaker 3:Some people end up saying this is for me. I love that and I want to continue on. Then some start to find that they gravitate towards certain parts of the world of consumer packaged goods. For me, it was that innovation experience and it dovetailed with that e-commerce experience. It really sort of whetted my appetite for something new.
Speaker 3:I will say that the leap wasn't one that just happened overnight. I heard someone talk about it a number of years ago, sort of listening to the whispers in your head. For me, for a few years, there were whispers about doing something like this. I spent the last really the last year I was at Campbell doing a bit of reflecting some exercises and sort of envisioning what your next chapter might be. It was one where I talked to my wife about it. We basically came to the agreement and they said why don't you just give this a shot?
Speaker 3:At the time, actually, when I left Campbell, this idea was sort of formulating in my mind. My plan was really to interview and look at startups. I just didn't think I'd necessarily create one. During the time I was interviewing with some early stage startups, I was reconnected with my co-founder, Ben, who he and I worked together at Campbell. We had both been sort of thinking about a similar thing in the similar space, and the rest is history. We got together and started to really put the plan together. It's both exciting and terrifying all wrapped in the one Right.
Speaker 2:If it's not terrifying, you're not doing it right. Tell me a little bit about True Places, the startup that you started four years ago, in 2019. So what do you walk into every Monday morning?
Speaker 3:I walk into a small team. Really on the payroll it's just Ben and I. We have engineers, we have third-party logistics teams, we have some marketing help, industrial designers. We have people that we work with, but in terms of the core team, for now it's us.
Speaker 2:So the support team is freelancers 1099 freelancers.
Speaker 3:Absolutely, absolutely All across the board accounting, packaging, design, everything. It takes a team, but it's a different way of operating and certainly a different way from my previous world. I mean you think about a team in corporate America. I mean you have a team of cross-functional specialists.
Speaker 2:Never fewer than 20. Exactly, exactly.
Speaker 3:You have all of a sudden you're having to do more of it or you're having to work with freelancers, and we've been very fortunate to find really good people to help work on the business.
Speaker 2:So your startup is what they call asset light and really variable costs, very few fixed costs, and the freelancers you have are, I imagine, spread all over the country.
Speaker 3:All over the country and, in some cases, global.
Speaker 2:Got you Talk a little bit about the product, so you came up with this high-end chair.
Speaker 3:Yeah, really it was. We knew the space as in we both Ben and I with our families, when we started the company in 2019, we recognized we spent a ton of time outdoors. When we say outdoors, we don't mean the great outdoors. That's great, Like you know, those camping trips you do once a year or once every other year. They're fantastic. But we recognize we were spending all this time, we were looking forward to these moments that we say are just outside your door, you know, hanging out with friends in your backyard around a fire pit, block parties, sidelines of kids' sports games, concerts in the park, all these moments that are opportunities to connect with friends and family. And that's really where the genesis of true places came from. Was that idea that no brand, no products are really speaking to those moments we felt, and so we started then just exploring, talking to friends, talking to family, talking to anyone who would the friends of friends, anyone who would listen yeah, and we asked them, we started just asking them about these moments and it became pretty clear early on.
Speaker 3:That sort of a literal pain point was that they were sitting for many times, hours, in these moments in sheep, uncomfortable camping chairs and, when you look at the category. A lot of the category has been sort of a race to the bottom in terms of quality and, while they are very portable, they're not very comfortable, In fairness to them. They really weren't designed for the moments that we're talking about. They're designed for you to take, you know, camping with you or you can hike with it. That's how the original design was formed. So when we started to learn more there, that was really the idea behind this first product, where we love in the future to introduce new products beyond the chair. Our intent was never to become a chair company, but really felt like we had to solve this first. If we wanted to make sure people were comfortable and connected around these settings, that we really had to solve this challenge.
Speaker 2:I love the way in which you're describing, you know, the problem. And then the name True Places. The brand name True Places certainly harks back to your solution to that problem and the fact that that problem is only being. I mean, the only solution that existed before True Places was the 29.99 chair. You know, raised to the bottom, cheapest, ubiquitous, you can buy it at any Walmart or whatever, right, and you came up with a premium product that's more expensive, right, I mean $150, $180 at price point, but people see the value in that, right.
Speaker 3:They do. They do and you have to. You know it's not as, as you know, with any product, any category, it's not as easy as just sort of introducing it to the world and saying it's premium and you're really gonna love it. You're talking about a significant premium to the category, so that's why we spend a lot of time. You know, as you talk about Mondays and Saturdays, you spend a lot of time trying to figure out the most effective ways to communicate what the features and benefits are.
Speaker 3:And you know, I think for us when we started, as an example, when we started, I think we thought the comfort really was going to be the most important thing. You shout comfort and because we heard from so many people that it was really uncomfortable and all the reasons why it wasn't comfortable, and while comfort is still a huge benefit in this product, we also learned that overall quality you know the sturdiness of it, the design of it, the colors there's a lot that's wrapped into quality. And just as many times as someone is saying I wanna buy this because it's really comfortable, they're also saying I really want a high quality chair for these moments. I sort of deserve it in these moments, and so that's been a good learning over the last couple years the way in which you answered my question.
Speaker 2:You know what made you chuck the paycheck every other Friday for reverse flow of money for a couple of years before you start picking up speed and you get the ROI. You gave a very thoughtful answer that you know I was just looking for. I mean you didn't say I always wanted to be an entrepreneur and sell chairs. You just loved the different dynamics, maybe, of startups and solving problems. I mean that seems to be a driving force, like how you're wired right, definitely definitely For me.
Speaker 3:The last few years in my previous role, I loved the teams I worked with and I was motivated by the brands or the projects. There was a bit of a feeling of being feeling stuck, like this was my path and one of the most impactful sort of exercises I did and I say it because there's a book called Designing your Life. It's by a couple of Stanford professors that I feel like it's more of an exercise than a book because it forces you. You know you're applying design thinking to bigger decisions in your life.
Speaker 3:For me, that was about a career and so it enabled me to sort of map out these alternate lives or alternate careers, and it was a point for me in my personal and professional life that was really impactful because you end up sharing it with people that you're close to and they can give you feedback. It got me unstuck. It was one of those times where I thought this is now. It doesn't feel like an anchor. It feels like I see these opportunities and that those lives I didn't map out. Entrepreneur. I mapped out maybe early stage startup, where you're working on an innovation pipeline, but it wasn't exactly to the career I have now, but it was in that space and I think that was very, very liberating for me and very energizing.
Speaker 2:So designing your life is the name of the book. I have not heard of it. Tell me a little bit more about that book, because it sounds like it was a big deal at the time you read it.
Speaker 3:Sure, yeah, it's written by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, I think, and it's if you think about any. You know, if anyone listening to this has worked on an innovation or even just a renovation of a base business, you probably have done a design thinking exercise, sort of empathizing with the potential customer. They're taking a similar approach. You're first doing a bit of an experience on your own of saying where have you been most energized, when have you been sort of most in the flow, and you're sort of journaling that throughout the day and then they're taking the pressure off. You know you're coming up with multiple lives Like it will pass in, whatever the decision is.
Speaker 3:For me it was a career and you're sort of writing them out and drawing them out using iconography. There's lots of sort of tricks that they have in it to help free you from saying, oh, I've got to get it perfectly right. And the reality is, when you get it down on paper, there are things that remain and there are other things that you might have missed the mark as you internalize. But the benefit of doing it and then sharing it with someone, I think you have to feel like you're in a safe space and they know you and they give you feedback. But that process starts for some people, myself included starts to get you out of a sort of internal dialogue of what am I gonna do next to a bit more proactive I sort of happened upon without reading that book, maybe reading a bunch of different books.
Speaker 2:One morning, early COVID days I think it was 2021, I was sitting over a cup of coffee thinking about what you just use the word flow, right. When was I in the flow of things? Like what are sort of the moments in my life where I was firing on all eight cylinders right In the right order? And when you think about those moments when you're in the flow, you're like, yeah, I nailed it right Personal life or professional life.
Speaker 2:I just took 45 an hour or whatever and I wrote down things that happened when I was five years old, 19 years old, 35 years old so personal, professional and then I looked for, like the common threads of those things. And that was so powerful and empowering because I realized like for me, the common thread is when are there situations where I walk and prepared? But then in the middle of it, I listen and stay curious and I'm willing to chuck the preparation for whatever is happening in the moment, because early in my 20s and 30s I would prepare and outwork anybody, right, but then when I was in the moment, I was so excited about the preparation I had done I wasn't listening to anybody. Uh-huh, that's fascinating, and it sounds like you and I kind of think similarly about like wanting to find superpowers in ourself, but also in your brand, right. What is the superpower of true places? It's not the price point, right? It's what? That moment, hanging out with friends and an impromptu tailgate party or something.
Speaker 3:Absolutely. And I'd say just to build on that, even in the profession of marketing or sort of brand management, I think I found over the years that there would be some colleagues or people I worked with that could talk about the existing brands. They would know the values, they would know the attributes, they would know the history and what energized them so much was being a steward of that brand. And I thought that was so telling because I appreciated it and I enjoyed that aspect of it, but I didn't have the passion they had for that stewardship.
Speaker 3:I think I love the idea of kind of trying to create something from scratch, something brand new. I think you're not one way or the other, but I think what you end up doing, what you end up seeing over the years, is people lean towards one of those versus the other and I found myself leaning more and more to sort of starting something from scratch, trying to build it, knowing it's gonna be messy, there's gonna be challenges with it, it's not always gonna work. Most of the time it won't work, but that's what kind of you only need to work one time, exactly, exactly.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I call that leaning into your superpower, which is not something I did in my 20s and 30s. It was all about I was constantly sort of looking over my shoulder who's doing it better than me, instead of, as you get older, you're kind of like no, I think I've learned a couple things, and which ones do I really enjoy leveraging Kind of back to the. You started the startup world, then 14, 15 years Fortune 500 company and then back in startup world. There are things that you and I both learned and treasure about the lessons we learned in corporate America right that are helping in startup world. Can you give me one or two things that you treasure from the corporate days and one or two things that you threw overboard because they were anchors?
Speaker 3:The one or two things that I think I held on to. So the first is probably the easiest, which is, whether you're in at least for me, whether I was at Campbell's or now you're often working with specialists, with people that are very good in their area, and you're trying to get, you're trying to work with them, to get their best work and bring that together with lots of other specialists, and I actually I think the Campbell's experience was perfect for this world. I mean, again, we talk about you're. It's not necessarily one team or everyone's part of the team, now that you're a startup, but you still you're trying to create this team environment and you're trying to bring together subject matter experts, and so I think that is still held true, very much so in this world. I think the you know.
Speaker 3:The second part of it is probably more specific to the actual roles, which is in brand management. It's general manager. You're general manager, at least at Campbell's, so they're prided themselves on a general manager upbringing. So you're exposed to all different parts of the business and you're many times responsible for those different parts, making that shift now to a albeit a smaller, earlier stage company. You're very comfortable looking at inventory. You know one hour advertising. The next engineering challenges, the following hour it is. It might be raw, it might be. You might have less history on these issues but it is it's like tabs on the.
Speaker 3:Celsius, exactly exactly. But and that's you know. I think then to transition of what you have to scrap is you have to scrap that idea of like there's gotta be more information, because you're just not going to have the decades of learning or expertise to draw from. You're gonna have to make more decisions, faster decisions, based on imperfect information. So I think that's one, and then the second is, I think, just the difference.
Speaker 3:I don't think it's specific to Campbell. I think you go from corporate America to a startup world, the startups. When you fail, it's often and it's like right in your face, right. So you just there's no posturing, there's no like, there's no angling, it just hits you and you're wiped out and you get better, you create a bit of a muscle. I don't think the failures, I mean you're just able to tolerate them a little more as the years go on in a startup world. It's not that you don't recognize them, it's just you're able to tolerate, you understand that that's part of the process and that leads to better output. And so I think that's probably one of the big things is you really have to embrace it. You have to embrace those challenges and, ultimately, the fears that come with that, but then the failure, because it's gonna smack you in the face here.
Speaker 2:It's interesting and I think one of the reasons I sort of left these billion dollar companies behind that I worked in early in my career for mid-sized companies is because I, you know, sort of looking into the rear view mirror, I found that the security of working for publicly traded, you know Fortune 500 billion dollar companies also bred sort of what I call empty suits. You know people that posture and you know, look good, posturing, but they're not really putting their pants on one. I mean they act like they're not putting their pants on one leg at a time like everybody else, right, and that to me is so in a way liberating and invigorating to get up in the morning and do stuff a little bit better than you did yesterday. And it's not perfect and it's not glamor shot pretty all the time, but if you can be effective and make a difference and you know I mean you're building a business with your partner and you're feeding your families and you're feeding some freelancers families, you know yeah absolutely.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean that definitely happens in larger companies. I was pretty fortunate that I worked with so many good leaders, both with and for a Campbell's, that I feel like I drew so much from them, their wisdom, that you end up applying that here and hopefully passing it on to other people down the road. But yeah, the idea of building something, of trying it, I think, was really important to me and it wasn't a loss that I mean I have children too in the house. I have a sophomore in high school and an eighth grader and the idea of giving it a shot and if it doesn't work out, you know, you try something else to me was also, I think I hope, a good lesson for them, you know, for their lives in the future.
Speaker 2:Oh, absolutely. I have a final question for you, or final sort of big topic maybe. True Places is a direct to consumer business and e-commerce website, so your channel is the fastest evolving and you know, whatever worked yesterday isn't even gonna exist tomorrow kind of channel, right. I mean, how do you keep up with the warp speed changes of digital technology, e-commerce? How do you keep up with it?
Speaker 3:I find there are some that are really on sort of the forefront of it and others that are, I would say I'm probably somewhere in the middle and the way I try to read as much as I can, I mean we do have the benefit of tapping in the subject matter experts, so we ask them a lot of questions. There are so many support, almost like teams, that can help guide you in that world. But it's also, I find, maybe one of the benefits of the startup world and, to your point, a direct to consumer is you can implement things very fast and you learn very quickly. So that idea of sort of trying and failing and then learning from it, I think is really an example would be. You know, the world of advertising has changed dramatically in the last like 10 years, even in this space, and if you were to look at the types of creative that you see connected to brands and the direct to consumer space, you see so much more user generated ads or founders messages.
Speaker 3:And I came from a background where you had big production plans. You had, like large agencies spending a ton. It took a long time Top down, not bottom up, that's exactly right, and I was a bit reluctant to sort of jump into that level because I had different quality expectations. My business, ben, my founder, rightfully pushed us saying like we need to explore this, and we did over the last year and it's been fantastic. It's been a really. It helped us refine our message, but it's also been very effective advertising and so you got to get out there and do it and see what works and what doesn't. And I think a sort of roundabout way of answering that question. But I think you have to embrace the change and just start trying things. It's probably the best answer.
Speaker 2:I imagine what is true in my work day is probably also true in your work day that there's a good chunk of time across a year, you know sometimes it's a whole day and sometimes it's, you know, 10 minutes here and 12 minutes there, but there's a good chunk of time across the year where I just read and check out competitors' websites or competitors of my clients' websites go into walk trade shows. You know, my former boss told me you know, a good merchant and marketer has big ears, big eyes and, you know, bigger than the mouse. So it is about listening and learning, right? I mean, how much of your time do you spend sort of keeping your ear to the ground on this digital warp speed evolution?
Speaker 3:A decent amount. I try to it. Actually, one thing that's worked out for me well is that I'm able to combine it a bit with something else for me, like I've enjoyed forever. I like to go for, you know, a short run, but it's changed over the last couple of years. I like to do longer walks as a way to just unwind and get away from the day to day, but I'll listen to podcasts all the time on those walks and you know, as you know, in your world you can listen to so many different subjects, and in this space there are some really e-commerce fuel as one, really, you're gonna get subject matter experts all the time coming in and talking about what's new and what's coming, and it's a way for me to sort of get boned up on it but also just relax a bit, get outside, get out in nature and kind of unwind.
Speaker 3:It's very relaxing to me to listen to it there. I think if I listen to it in front of my laptop while I'm working, I think it's fine. I just I'm not sure I absorb it as much, and so that's one sort of trick I've learned over the last couple of years that's been really helpful for me.
Speaker 2:Nelson, this was a great conversation. I thank you for taking the time to kind of share your growth journey. I love the term you used earlier. I listened to the whispers in my head. I love the book recommendation Designing your Life A lot of great stuff. If folks wanted to reach out to you, where might they find you or your website?
Speaker 3:Sure, sure, and I've really enjoyed the conversation too. Benno, this has been great. Trueplaces. com is the website, but anyone that wants to reach out to me, nelson@ Trueplaces. com, is the best way to get in touch with me.
Speaker 2:Terrific. Thank you so much, hey. If folks wanted to explore other growth topics, you can find me on our website, reALIGNforResults. com, or just email me, benno@reALIGNforResults. com. Thank you, and till next time, keep growing. Thank you so much, Nelson.
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