Rob Hamblett:
Hello and welcome to the CX Coffee Chat, where we brew up insights on how fast growing companies can craft unforgettable customer experiences. I’m your host, Rob Hamblett, and today we’re joined by a guest who brings a rare blend of industrial design, entrepreneurial grit, and customer obsession.
Simon Enever is a seasoned product designer and brand builder, best known as the founder and former CEO of Quip, the oral care company that has redefined how more than 15 million Americans think about their everyday health habits. Under Simon’s leadership, Quip scaled from an idea on a page to a category-defining brand, selling over 50 million products and generating nine-figure annual revenues, all while keeping customer experience front and center.
Today, Simon continues to shape how great products and experiences come to life with the launch of So&So, a startup studio building new disruptor brands while also lending skills and experience to help founders launch and scale their own companies. He brings that same customer-first mindset to his work with scale-ups, focusing not just on what sells, but how customers feel along every step of the journey. Hello, Simon. Welcome and thank you for joining us.
Simon Enever:
My pleasure to be here, Rob. Excited to talk about this.
Rob Hamblett:
Well, let’s start from the start. Outside of the fashion industry, the journey from designer to CEO isn’t a very well-trodden path. How did this happen for you and what was it like?
Simon Enever:
Yeah, there’s not too many examples, I don’t think. There’s some famous ones that went from industrial design to driving big companies. But I always wanted to own my own business. I think that got rebranded into entrepreneurship at some point. So I think that phase, which is quite a lot of the first few years, was very natural. It’s just something I wanted to do, leading a team I enjoyed doing. But yeah, once you get to that kind of scale and you start to see the company meet those more classic CEO, traits, guess. I actually think the industrial design degree I did was oddly suited to the skills you needed. It’s a degree where you kind of learn a bit of everything. You’ve got to dabble across a whole bunch of different skill sets. You’re very broad and not so deep, perhaps, in certain areas, which is kind of that CEO thing, being across everything.
And so much of it was vision building, storytelling, and presentation, which is a massive part of being a CEO, especially as you grow your team. I would probably say on the part that you’re not prepared for, is the growing the team part. think most people would say that whatever their background and education, it’s hard to educate those experiences, but the phases of team growth from the difference of 0 to 5, 5 to 15, 15 to 50 people and then, know, 50, we got up to about 250 at some point is it’s amazing the different phases you go through and you can’t be taught that and you learn a lot of lessons along the way. But yeah, you know, overall it was odd how applicable the degree was actually to that role.
Rob Hamblett:
So you had the educational background, not necessarily the experience of growing, scaling, doing things differently. Where did you go to get support for that?
Simon Enever:
Yeah, I think honestly, I actually in hindsight wish I’d… and again, maybe this is easy to say second time around, but I wish I’d gone and sought more support. I kind of went from heads down design consultant working around the clock with the head in the sand to startup founder with the head in the sand. And like all you’re obsessing about is getting this product live. And then when it’s live, how on earth do I keep it live? So, I really didn’t have the network really much or any of a network for kind of your classic advisory support first time around. I would have that and probably listen to that more this time.
I really focused on just building a great team around me, especially in those areas, the people growth site, for example, bringing in more experience there where I just had absolutely no experience. think I really lent on the team, building a great team out.
Rob Hamblett:
And that’s obviously seen to work over the space of a decade. You took quit from the 300k seed round to turning over hundreds of millions of dollars each year. Can you talk us through some of the pivotal moments, decisions that made that growth possible?
Simon Enever:
Yeah, there was obviously a million over a decade. And I think the obviously difference between moments and decisions, I think some moments that is hard to control, you can’t ignore the first funding. I’m sure we’ll talk about funding a little bit, but it was really tough and getting that first big enough to launch CHECK was a massive moment naturally.
I think a huge thing for us was we got so much advice pre-launch and honestly post-launch, but very much pre-launch around what we should be doing differently about our product. And there’s just this trend I continue to see where investors typically want you to be a cookie cutter. They want you to almost rebrand a thing that’s already out there done in a way that’s already done using methods that are trusted and they can kind of pattern match.
And we just didn’t listen to any of that because we were like, how can you disrupt a category if you’re doing the same thing everyone is doing, perhaps with a nicer name and a bit better coloring? just somewhat ignoring that was a big decision, a tough decision because we hadn’t done this before, but huge. We wouldn’t have got anywhere near where we got to without being actually novel, I think, without products and sticking to that.
And then a major one that I speak about all the time and people come to us now for advice on and help on getting into was going to mass retail over in the US you know, target was, is one of the biggest retailers. And we were probably thinking. We probably entered target two years earlier than we were otherwise planning. It was back in the day when DTC was everything and you thought, you know, people thought that was the future and you only ever had to be online. And we had actually someone come in who now works with me at so-and-so again, who was like, no, let’s do it. And in about six months, we somehow got into Target and launched Nationwide. And it was, you know, it doubled our business, you know, pretty much overnight. And it was easier then to get in there. It was easier then to be in there with a lot less noise because we’re probably only the second company to get in there. So that was a massive moment. Yeah.
Rob Hamblett:
You mentioned funding there and also disrupting a category doing something different. As a first-time founder, with that idea, did you find it difficult to raise capital?
Simon Enever:
Yeah, raising capital was a nightmare and just not a fun process the whole time. know, I think there is, arguably this is changing maybe slower than it should be over the years. There’s definitely a, you know, a persona that funds fund managers are looking for often a reflection of themselves. You know, your classic kind of Ivy league schooled finance background, business background, second time founder.
And as a designer with no network coming from the UK, that was a challenge. And it was a challenge not just for the seed funding, it was a challenge throughout. I think we… we get bucketed in a group of other 2015 era startups who raised a really significant amount of money over the years. And we probably raised a quarter of what they did and got to a similar scale. yeah, it was always a challenge. And I don’t know what the magic thing is about it. We had an amazing product market fit. We saw people in and out of our category raise money without any of the kind core business metrics we had.
So yeah, know, it’s luckily a changing landscape and a lot of great funds kind of coming out there that support more diverse, let’s say founders, know, that aren’t your classic, your typical.
Rob Hamblett:
Awesome, got you. And you mentioned product market fit there, which is obviously essential for success, for growth, for scaling. And you were competing in a particularly saturated market, which is dominated by legacy brands that everyone will see in their bathrooms every day. But how did you develop products that landed so well with customers? Did you use customer feedback to inform product development? What did that look like for you?
Simon Enever:
Yeah, I mean, look, honestly, first time around, there’s a lot of luck that needs to be involved. In general, there’s a lot of luck that needs to be involved with startups, you know, and having that kind of success. Our first product, I would say, was one of those examples, you myself, my co-founder, Bill May, we just had this gut feeling. We did a lot of research, we to a lot of dentists. We spoke to a lot of people. Everyone brushes their teeth. It’s not, you know, in oral care, it’s a big market of people that you can speak to.
And look, I think the gap was so obvious to us and it turned out to be there and we kind of nailed it and we were lucky. Where that changed was once we were going. Honestly, we had probably three or four of our following products where we went maybe perhaps off that designer’s gut, internal team only intuition. would say that we created some amazing products that were great online because you could find the niche for them, but they were not successful at mass retail.
And then that changed. It brought in some really amazing team members to the team to compliment. We always did our design process in house. So we had amazing design engineering. We brought in some kind of research insights, classically trained product marketing people and change it completely where we kind of balance that, you know, disruptive thinking designer mindset with the classic research and I think, you know, we had amazing successes at the end where we combine the two things and we’re able to disrupt the, you know, the shelf with, with really none of the marketing budget of the incumbents because we had the, yeah, we balanced the two. I would also just quickly add that having a million subscribers that you can speak to constantly was massive. That was what the incumbents were jealous of or looking for in companies like us, having that direct connection to customers. we would survey them annually with a kind of census. We would do a biannual in-home research with them.
And every product we did, we would take them along every phase gate of development. was amazing to me to do that with your own customers. that was central to what we’re doing, and also central to what we’re doing with so-and-so and future ventures.
Rob Hamblett:
Awesome. Yeah, that must be a really big benefit being able to know your precise customers without having that gap in terms of the distributors, et cetera. But I guess thinking about the competitors again, they’ve got unlimited resources to be able to meet all of these needs. Did you find it a challenge to meet and exceed customer expectations without that big sack of money next to you?
Simon Enever:
It’s funny, I think on the product development side, not as much because and it’s almost a known thing like the larger the company, the harder they sometimes can find innovation internally. It’s many reasons, you know, red tape, perhaps not able to attract the kind of talent you can, hard to move fast. I would say on the… broadest, there’s many examples beyond that that were tough. I think a big one, which I’m sure you work with and think about a lot was on the delivery side. We went through the era where Prime launched, Amazon Prime launched. And so it went from, wow, DTC, quick shipping, free shipping, but quick was five days. And free wasn’t that impactful at the time, free shipping that came in the same day and now suddenly small startup was expected to somehow compete with Amazon. And that was a massive shift where I think for a period of time, a lot of startups actually just burnt a lot of money trying to copy or compete with an Amazon. And that’s impossible. You can’t have the logistics they do. So that was probably the biggest example is more on the platform side, the distribution side, obviously marketing is another big one.
Rob Hamblett:
And as you grew I imagine it was pretty difficult to keep ahead of demand and keep ahead of thinking what’s next. Was there ever a point where you looked into outsourcing and bringing in external support to help you as you scaled?
Simon Enever:
Constantly. And I will say like by the end, once the focus changed from growth to then, you know, consolidation or just all kind of, yeah, a bit more consolidation and maturation, if that’s even the way to say it. Absolutely. But we were constantly trying to outsource. We were honestly, you know, trying to at least partially outsource CX probably every, every month or every year from the beginning. You know, we, again, times were a little bit different. Like we had to build … Shopify did not work for subscriptions. So we had to build our whole platform ourselves. And so not only was our product nuanced, you know, it’s a tough product to… brush it sounds crazy but an electronic object in the bathroom which is a very moist environment that people some people could brush like crazy you know there’s just more issues than say a skincare brand or a makeup brand.
So that was tough. Yeah, we didn’t have platforms like Shopify, so we built everything ourselves. We had a two-part challenge. So, migration was really difficult and the problems we were solving were very complex and we were growing really fast. So we tried a lot. We did our own versions of outsourcing on the CX side. We actually kind of in outsourced. We opened an office in Utah again, like our own owned CX experience. And then slowly over time, started to integrate some of that. But if I was doing it again today and knowing the differences in platforms and also product learning, that would have been a big help if we were able to at minimum supplement ourselves, but really do more of that.
Rob Hamblett:
It’s awesome and it seems that Quip was never just going to be a toothbrush company. It’s obviously where you started but there was quite a lot of diversification and innovation that happened. I read that you acquired a dental insurance startup at some point as well.
Simon Enever:
Yeah, honestly, from the very beginning, in the US at least, we’re very much alone. It’s like the, well, actually at the beginning, kind of the ‘Instagram toothbrush’ was how people used to say it, because they see us everywhere on there. So we were kind of known for the toothbrush. We certainly grew the family to a point where we were known for more, but the vision from the very beginning was, um, really to be like your all-in-one oral care companion. We changed how we said that internally over the years. And nowadays that would almost be thought of as like an AI, like a quite literal AI companion, I would say. We really wanted to be the place you went to manage your oral care. didn’t like dealing with their oral care and they were really eager to have someone that they trusted and liked take it all over because of that. so we wanted to be, whether it was you needed new products, you needed toothpaste sent to you, floss sent to you. We wanted to do an in-home teledentistry visit to check up on the progress of your teeth or even book care and even go and get care. We were really trying to build the big 360 degree holistic platform. Honestly, we built most of those pieces. We tested it. We kind of soft launched pieces. Unfortunately, as the markets changed and the focus has had to change over the last couple of years, that vision kind of had to go to the side. But yeah, it was always a big vision. I still think it’s the right vision for the oral care space someone to kind of see it out because it’s where the world’s going, you know? I think it’s exciting.
Rob Hamblett:
It’s interesting how you talk about oral care there because it’s one of those, I don’t know if I mean dichotomies, but people want to have really nice teeth, but it’s probably one of those things that they think about the least because if you do have something wrong, you almost don’t want to know about it. So did you ever find that when you were talking with customers that there was a difference between words and actions and desires and actual outputs?
Simon Enever:
Completely. I mean, perhaps more obviously on the… product side, know, we, like I said earlier, we, we, we really involved our entire, our entire subscriber base in product development. And we were constantly told how excited people were for us. We built a whole roadmap around what they were asking for and asking for in large percentages. You create those products. created them for them with them exactly how they wanted. When it came to the moment of, you know, buying them, you know, it’s all okay. It’s still, you know, that’s hard enough in any industry. But I think when you’re in a space where innately people don’t want to… they don’t want to pick up the brush. They do not want to floss. They will never want to go to the dentist. It was always a challenge.
Rob Hamblett:
Yeah, well, I guess the benefit of where you are now is you understand the oil care industry, you understand customers, but you’re now thinking about your new venture having run Quip for over a decade and you’re thinking about so-and-so and launching that. So, could you tell us a bit more about it?
Simon Enever:
Yeah, look, at the core of it is really trying to get the best of the team back together and build an amazing team of new people that we haven’t worked with over the years to try and kind of replicate that success and more in new areas. We had an amazing, it was an amazing decade of learning, of experiences, highs as always more lows than highs, but like the high, you know, some amazing experiences, crazy amount of learning. It’s an education you couldn’t possibly pay for anywhere else. And so we’re looking to kind of box that, I’ll package that up.
And I think above all, how we’ve set ourselves up as a studio, really for a whole world of reasons, but the primary one is we want to be able to work on more than one thing at once, if it makes sense to. And really crucially, we want to be able to help other startups while we’re building our own, which is probably where more of the unique model is typically studios helping others or it’s building their own things. And we’re trying to balance the two.
Rob Hamblett:
Awesome. What do you think are the main strategies, experiences, et cetera, that you will be taking from Quip and the successful side of it, guess, into planning and implementing So&So to support growth, profitability, other brands, et cetera?
Simon Enever:
Look, I think we’re generally bringing together the group that took us from zero all the way to its peak. And we’re doing so in a way that is bringing in skills from all of what we see as the core areas. And what we were known for, what people came to us for, what we felt like we excelled at when we were equipped. The product side, really developing novel products that we know how impactful it can be to actually put the effort in there and the moats you can create. Marketing and D2C, we were always ahead of the curve on where was the next channel to market and or drive your D2C platform.
Uh, mass retail, like I said, like that was a huge, that was the second phase of the company. You know, the learnings on how to get in there, what they’re looking for, what to be ready for when you’re in there and how to develop your roadmap around that is huge. Um, and then just, you know, the core operations and finance of all of those things, you know, your business changes a lot when you go from D to C, you know, Amazon retail, um, it’s, it’s, it’s a lot to be able to deal with operationally and on the projection side. So, you know, we’ve brought in leaders across all of those. Um, and I’d say the initial core team though is a lot around product development and how we wrap those things together. I think our unique selling point, our magic source by the end, like I said earlier, was when we combined that the research, really the research part of the development part and the knowledge of how different DTC, Amazon and retail can be and things to watch out for. So now we’re able to kind of develop companies, really companies, startups, brands, products with all of that vision in mind and do it together in-house rather than kind of having to go to an agency for this part, an agency for that part and, you know, bring it together. I think it’s the big thing that we’re trying to replicate more than anything.
Rob Hamblett:
And with all that personal and professional experience that you’ve gathered running QUIP, and now onto So&So, has it been a different experience on a raise funds this time around?
Simon Enever:
It certainly has, you we’re only a year in and we’ve been focused more on the build. So it’s not like we spent all of our time fundraising yet. We’re certainly, you know, looking to help guide others as they do that. I would say, look on the personal side, it’s, it is a lot easier being a second time founder, you know, with ultimately funds are usually backing the founder. And, and when you’ve done it before that, that certainly helps and, and for us, that means just being taking the way we’re using that is just to be more picky, honestly, with who we’re bringing in, really trying to bring in people that are not just the obvious, friendly and founder friendly and seeing the big vision, but strategic. I think I saw a lot of the benefits of having strategic money, perhaps over just hands off money and how much I can help you develop. So that’s a big thing we’re focused on and luckily able to do this time around. Look, I would say the market’s tough generally though, even for people that have done you know, a group that have done what we did at Quip and others, you know, since with the team. It’s a tough market out there. So it’s, you know, there’s some things you just can’t change. And we’re in one of those moments where it’s harder than it’s certainly a lot harder than it was in times like 2021, for example, where it felt like you could just walk out and tell someone an idea and someone will give you money.
Rob Hamblett:
Okay, well good luck. I hope it’s going well on that on the most recent round and there’s something that I noticed when I looked both at Quip and it’s so and so is that you seem to love finding inspiration from your personal life Quip has come from trips and visits to the dentist I know that you found inspiration from tearing your ACL and the impact that had on you. I’m interested to know how you plan to use those types of experiences to develop, to launch, to accelerate new consumer products, but also does it then fit into the way you offer, the way they’re bought in terms of customer experience and anything like that.
Simon Enever:
Yeah, I think that ultimately, you know, it’s almost, it’s almost like the advice I generally give founders and as a whole, you know, focusing on it is, it is, there’s, there’s a small subset of people that are probably suited to, fully found, at least certainly solo, you know, a small team founding company. And because it’s just, it’s just a lot, you know, it’s a drag, it’s a lot of hours and a lot of grit and all of the things that everyone hears and knows all the time. And so the only way you can get through that honestly is by working on things that you are passionate about, you know, and ideally and really should have really experienced directly. And I think when you have, when you’re passionate about something and you’ve experienced it and it’s kind of affected you, it gets a lot easier to then put in the kind of the hours, the research, the work, the development. And when things go wrong, which they are going wrong more than they’re going right most of the time, it’s a lot easier because you get up and you’re just passionate about solving a problem. And so I think, you know, yeah, tied to that is like solving real problems. You know, I think entrepreneurism became such a kind of cool thing to try and do that. I think a lot of problems got created or get created, you know, just to try and create a solution. I think like really looking for real problems out there that you’re passionate about and have some sort of an experience in, I think.
It’s just something we’re always going to look at, especially when we’re building our own ventures going forward with so and so. We need that passion to drive it the way we know we need to.
Rob Hamblett:
That’s some good advice there and I wonder if it then goes into what else entrepreneurs, leaders should be doing. You’ve taken Quip from no team, no customers to a market leader. You’re now starting and doing the same from zero again and so and so. Aside from what you’ve just mentioned there about passion, what advice would you give to aspiring entrepreneurs who are looking to disrupt an industry, build, grow long lasting brands?
Simon Enever:
So, okay.
Yeah, one piece is going to be a bit contradictory to some degree, but it’s a balance. I think one is, as you touched on and asked about earlier, you’ve got to seek advice. Like don’t just keep your head in the sand. People have been through not everything you have and certainly not the version of the thing you’re doing. And that’s where the nuance comes, but a lot of the things you have to do to get somewhere everyone, know, there’s thousands of people that have done it. So, seek advice. And secondly, like listen to it and take it when you take it, especially when you have no idea about an area, a thing, a stage of the company. And they clearly do, you know, they’ve done a few times. The caveat to that is like, don’t blindly take advice, you know, I think particularly don’t listen to particularly don’t listen to just blind naysayers who are kind of blanket saying, yeah, why would you like, why would you do this? Why get into that area? Like, I just, it’s not gonna work. Like I think in that situation, listen to your gut, like, you’re gonna kind of know if you think you can push through that. We got told by everyone apart from, guess, one or two people at one point, hundreds of thousands of people at some point that you’re never going to disrupt oral care. There’s Colgate, there’s Philips, there’s Oral-B, there’s all these massive companies. There’s no chance. How are you going to do that with all the money in the world? And we did, you know, and so there’s the balance there. So yeah, think seek advice, but like don’t blindly listen to it and go and run with it. Especially when, again, you are more of an expert than you.
You quickly become more of an expert in a field than most people ever are or will be if you immerse yourself in that field. So surround yourselves with people in that field or those fields or those skill sets or those, you know, those particular functions and listen to them, but just be careful. You’ve got to balance it and kind of look at the big picture of all the things you’re hearing. And yeah, I would, I would end on the gut thing, you know, like you, that is a powerful thing. It’s not always right, but I think for some of the core pieces, listen to it both ways. If you’re really feeling you think this is right, push through and see it out. If your gut is telling you that maybe, and if your gut is telling you and advisors are telling you perhaps don’t do a thing, probably don’t do the thing.
Rob Hamblett:
I’m reading between the lines here, but when seeking advice in terms of growing a brand, maybe come and have a chat with So&So.
Simon Enever:
Yeah, there you go. Yeah. Thanks for plugging for me. Yeah, I’m bad at that. But yeah, that’s, that’s a big part of what we’re offering. And I think it’s from the basis of being founders, which it is, I always found it easier to take advice from founders. You know, you know, that they’ve gone through the, all of the things, not just one of the things. And so, yeah, that’s, that’s, that’s a lot of what we’re looking to help people with.
Rob Hamblett:
Well thank you very much for your time today Simon and thank you all for listening. This has been the CX Coffee Chat.
