Reshaping Consumer Habits with Helena Hambrecht of Haus (Part 2)

Kristen:

We are recording in three, two, one. Helena, welcome back. I am not surprised we had to split this into two episodes. What about you?

Helena:

Hello. It's nice to be back.

Kristen:

I knew we were going to talk for too long to be able to do it in an hour, so we broke it into two. Just to kind of get us back on track with where the conversation was going from part one that we released earlier this week, I want to just start by going a little bit higher level. When you guys at Haus are thinking about customer retention and customer loyalty. How are you really approaching it from a high level?

Helena:

Yeah. So, retention was always a thing for us. Mostly because we come from the retention side of alcohol. I'll take five steps back there. So, there's a couple of different types of alcohol buyers, which once I describe it you'll be like, "Oh yeah, that's me." There's the impulse alcohol buyer, which is all of us at some point in our life where we're like, "Oh, it's Friday. I'm going to a friend's house, or I'm cooking dinner with my partner or whatever. I need a bottle of wine right now, or I need to give someone a gift. Oh, I need to go buy a bottle of nice whiskey." That is the impulse buyer, and those purchasing decisions are made offline. They're made in the grocery store, they're made in the liquor store, they're made in the bodega. Wherever you're able to get alcohol the moment that you need it.

Helena:

There's different drivers for those purchasing decisions. There's the basic, which is you already have a brand that you know of and is your go to. If it's a bottle of wine, people are typically influenced by packaging, the illustration on the bottle. They're highly influenced by price. A lot of times the packaging is doing the bulk of the work in terms of informing your decision. So, there's a whole realm of psychology around the impulse buy, but the primary thing is people need it right now. So, they're going to go to the place where they can get it right now. Then there's this other side of alcohol, which is a much smaller percentage of the alcohol industry, and it is the loyal retention buyer. That really hasn't had much of a place in the alcohol industry other than wine clubs.

Kristen:

Yeah.

Helena:

The occasional brewery, right? So, I think craft beer, a tiny bit of craft whisky, but it's more tourism based. Then wine clubs is the biggest one. That is a whole different set of psychology. Obviously brand affinity plays a huge part. You wouldn't just randomly decide to join a wine club. You have to find it first. So you have to know what you're looking for, but we come from, we being me and Woody, my husband co-founder, come from the world of wine clubs. Woody had a winery prior to Haus, and by winery I mean a wine club called Alysian, and he had a ton of members and every quarter we'd send wine to those members. So, the main drivers that you see around that subscription alcohol aren't actually that different from a lot of the retention tenets that you see for other direct to consumer brands.

Helena:

A big one is affinity for the founders. So that's for when you think of founder led brands like a Glossier or your fav, Outdoor Voices. Those founder led brands that were built that way. It's this affinity for the founders and wanting to have some proximity to them, or just wanting to identify with them in some way. For Woody, for his wine clubs, that was people's ability to be like, "Oh yeah. I know a guy in Wine Country. He's awesome, his name is Woody. I can text him right now and come do a tasting on his farm." Then there's a programming component which is really strong, which is events. For the case of wine clubs, it's people wanting to gather around wine and food.

Kristen:

Yeah.

Helena:

That for the wine industry is pick up parties, it's wine dinners that you host with cool restaurants. It's just a thing, and if you're a member of a wine club, you get invites to these events and it's exciting. Then a very related tenet is community. Again, community is such a buzzword right now but it's been a thing in wine clubs forever where you're not going to just drink this wine and eat food in a vacuum. You're going to an event where there's maybe 20, or 30, or 50, or 100 other people that are also into this wine and they also like Woody. They're also into the food that's being served, and you get to go and meet people who share these values. Again, we're in this time where people are looking for communities. It's a shortcut to knowing that you could meet people who are in the same things as you, and [crosstalk] values.

Kristen:

Yeah.

Helena:

A pretty common one is people really being into food and beverage. That alone, even though that seems kind of a common thing to have in common, it is a really good driver for bringing people together. So, that was our experience on the subscription side of alcohol that really informed our hypothesis that Haus could easily bring those tenets into our brand. Even though we're going bigger. Woody's wine club was never going to scale with the internet in the same way that Haus can. There's still a lot that we can do to take those tenants and apply them to Haus even though we theoretically are going to scale much larger thanks to the internet.

Kristen:

Yeah. I love how you brought up these drivers too, and this is something that I had actually seen somebody post about on Twitter, and now I can't think of who it was, but I will make sure this is linked up in the show notes. He was saying pretty much exactly what you're saying. I think what he was saying, there's this huge opportunity if DTC brands were to start learning from the wine industry, actually. Around these wine clubs and this idea that a winery has to incorporate so many different things in order to build that kind of retention. Feeling into it. Systems, so it's everything from making products that are really good, but also making products that can stand on a shelf and speak to customers in that place, but also making events that are connecting with people. Then creating a community.

Kristen:

It's actually a really good comparison to a lot of the retention stuff we talk about in general with DTC. So, it's really cool to hear you feed that back and hear it again that there is this, like you said, almost a built in retention machine with it. So obviously this leads us pretty naturally into our conversation today, which is you guys officially launched subscriptions towards the end of January. Obviously you just gave us some good reasons on why you guys did it. I can kind of make my assumptions, but just from your side of the story why did you guys one, choose to launch subscriptions when you did? Then also you guys launched it as more of a membership versus a subscribe and save program. What were your considerations going into that?

Helena:

Yeah. So, it's funny because based on all of our experiences through the wine industry, Haus was always going to be a subscription. It would always have a subscription component. I actually, when we first had the idea for Haus, I wanted to launch it subscription from the start but pretty quickly we decided to backtrack because it's like, "Okay, wait. Let's just teach people one thing at a time." Right?

Kristen:

Yeah, [crosstalk].

Helena:

People what Aperitifs even are. It probably will be harder to get people to commit to subscribe to a thing that they don't know anything about. So, we decided to not do that to start, but it also allowed us to actually test that hypothesis a little more, right? It was a gut decision, sure, but it always helps to have data to backup starting something as significant as a membership program. So when we launched, we obviously had direct data on customers, which is exciting for us as a liquor company. We're the first to ever have that, but we were able to just see buying behavior. What is the repeat rate? When are people buying? We had a really high repeat rate for a brand that was growing very quickly. We had about a third of all of our customers were buying again.

Kristen:

Wow.

Helena:

When we were looking at the numbers in terms of when do they re-buy, is it driven by any particular thing? They were buying every three weeks, and it wasn't driven by a particular launch, it wasn't driven by a particular cohort. It was the same behavior whether you joined in July or October. It was every three weeks, and so that was a good sign. Like, "Okay, great. Not only are our retention numbers looking good, but it lends itself to a subscription. [crosstalk] natural behavior." So, we had that data and we were also going in and interviewing customers, and doing interviews, and trying to get some more qualitative data on what people were liking about the experience. What could be improved, et cetera. When we asked folks what their number one feature request would be, it was a subscription. The number one request from people was a subscription, and when we asked them, "What kind of frequency would you hypothetically want?" The most common answer that we got was four bottles a month.

Kristen:

Wow.

Helena:

That's a shit load of Haus.

Kristen:

Yeah.

Helena:

I mean, you can do the math on that. Just even from a revenue standpoint, if the average club value was four bottles a month, we would only need 800 members to do a million dollars in revenue a year.

Kristen:

Wow.

Helena:

So, that's the beauty of the internet, right?

Kristen:

Yep.

Helena:

800 members is a lot for a small, independent winery in Wine Country who probably doesn't have the capacity to do events for 800 people all the time, but for a brand that has internet scale and has supply chain and logistics figured out, and has the ability to travel and do distributed events across the country, it's not that crazy. When you think about the scale of the internet, it's not that crazy for us one day to have 10,000 members, right?

Kristen:

Yeah.

Helena:

So, that was very exciting for us to think about. All of that really made us feel like, okay. There's two ways to go about retention, right? You can launch a program that isn't necessarily tied to a consumer behavior that's already occurring organically, and so the burden is on you to educate this person on the program and really nudge them, and push them, and incentivize them to join this program. Or if you're lucky, you already see these behaviors occurring organically, and so you can build a program that just nestles its way in to that organic behavior. So, you don't actually have to do a hard sell. You're just rewarding people for a behavior that they're already engaging in, and that's what we ended up being able to do with Haus.

Kristen:

Yeah, and I love that. I want to pull out something that you mentioned, which is the fact that you guys actually got on the phone and interviewed customers. This is something that I'm kind of working on some thoughts about Outdoor Voices right now, and something I did was I talked to two people that I know who are just fanatic customers of that brand, and I learned more from those two customers than I did from talking to any DTC expert out there. There is so much power in just hearing the words that your customers use on simple things. I'm curious, when you guys start doing this, how did you determine what customers you were going to try and contact first? Then when you got in those conversations, what were you actually asking? What was the entire goal of those conversations? I know this is a topic that a lot of brands know they should be doing, but not really sure how to get started on it.

Helena:

Yeah. I mean, I think it's two fold. It's not just about what we can take away, it's also, what can we give? I think when you're thinking about these tenets that really drive loyalty, proximity to the founders is a big one. So, even if I wasn't doing every interview, I only did a portion of them, but to have a member of the Haus team reach out just to say hi and thank you, and want to have a conversation and want to just learn about this person, I think that can be a really exciting thing for a lot of people.

Helena:

... about this person like that. I think that can be a really exciting thing for a lot of people who are into a brand, so for us, we not only wanted to treat it as a what can we get out of this, but also, can we just treat this as talking to another human being who is stoked on our product? And, we're stoked on them for that reason, and we want to know them, and meet face to face even if it's over FaceTime, and just kind of say hello, those kinds of things. I think just remembering that people are human beings helps a lot in those [crosstalk].

Kristen:

Yeah.

Helena:

And, part of it is really just like, oh yeah, hey, we want to actually know you, because you found us early, and you invested in us early, and that's really cool, and we want to say, hey and thank you. That was a big part of it, but we chose a couple of different customer types. Hold on just a second. Hey, who's in here?

Woody:

It's me.

Helena:

Hey, I'm doing a podcast.

Woody:

Oh, I'm sorry.

Helena:

It's cool. Love you.

Woody:

Love you too.

Helena:

That's Woody.

Kristen:

Hi Woody.

Helena:

You can say just don't be too loud. We went after customers that had bought many times, some of our top customers, and then, we also interviewed customers who hadn't bought. Again, because we wanted to not only see what drove that repeat behavior, but also see, okay, if this person didn't buy again, is there a particular reason, or did they just not feel compelled to make it a regular part of their life? So, trying to figure out if there were any kind of outliers on the positive side and the negative side, or what an average customer might look like? We didn't want to be too prescriptive. I can't talk today, prescriptive [crosstalk]

Kristen:

Welcome to Playing For Keeps where none of us can ever talk. This is what we do hear.

Helena:

Yeah, gosh [inaudible] let's do a podcast.

Kristen:

Let's do a podcast. Kristen messes up every three words. It's fine.

Helena:

Good, it's a differentiator, always sets you apart.

Kristen:

Authentic, which is a word I have struggled to see before, as my listeners know.

Helena:

Cool, but yeah, so for us it was like we wanted to keep an open mind about it, and I know that there were perhaps certain things that we could glean, but also, just get a general read on behaviors of like, okay we can see the data shows us that you're a person who's displaying this type of behavior. I wonder why? And, just kind of dig into that.

Kristen:

Yeah, and that's really the power, and that kind of comes around to this idea, again, the theme of Playing For Keeps this season is, customers before metrics theme/idea is that like what you're saying is, there's a why behind the data, and the data is really, really helpful, but to be able to actually connect with a human and hear the why behind the numbers that you're looking at is a lot more powerful than just the metrics themselves, and that's really like the mission of this podcast, and just want to highlight that for the listeners that you're listening to one of the most successful founders in DTC right now saying that the customers and the why behind the numbers are really, really so powerful.

Kristen:

[inaudible] you've been in the subscription now for a couple of months, a month. About a month with when we're recording now, time is not on my side right now. I'm curious if you've already noticed kind of any struggles or obstacles trying to run a subscription on an eCommerce site?

Helena:

It's pretty early to tell. I mean, we've had some little technical snafus of like, we create a new variant, and accidentally those people that should have been on that variant weren't on that variant. There's little technical thingies, but that's not a huge deal. It's very interesting being on a very evolved piece of eCommerce software like Shopify now where, I swear wine country, winery software was just made by a bunch of trolls who didn't want [inaudible]. It's horrible. Wine industry software is horrible, but there are actually a couple of features in winery subscription software that I would love to see be more easily implemented in something like Shopify.

Helena:

The biggest one is that, there's a piece of winery software. Again, I can't remember what they are anymore because they're all horrible, and I want to forget them, but you can do a custom case, and so, what that means is if you are a member of a wine club, like if you're a member of Scribe Winery or whatever, actually I don't know if they have the software, but if you were a member of Woody's Winery prior to house, and you wanted to make a custom case before the software, you would just have to email Woody and be like, "Hey, I saw what you're offering this quarter. Could I actually just do a case of your Sauvignon Blanc with two bottles of Seraw or whatever."

Helena:

And, Wood would probably do that because he's a nice guy, but the software would allow you to just pull from what is inventory and make a custom case, like [crosstalk] whoa, Woody's winery has a hundred bottles of 2018 Seraw left and an X amounts of this, and X amounts of that, and you could just put together your own a la carte case, and it would just be easily fulfillable on the back end, and it would be really seamless for the customer, and I haven't actually found anything like that for us.

Helena:

We don't necessarily need that yet, but when you think about our future, and us having more skews, and just wanting to be able to give that functionality to a customer, because different seasons mean you might want different flavors, or hold on a second... Hey, hey, who's in here?

Woody:

Oh, you could hear that?

Helena:

Uh-huh (affirmative). Love you.

Woody:

[inaudible].

Helena:

It's okay. Anyway, as customers, seasonality changes, they may want different flavors for the summer versus winter, or they just want to switch it up, or we have limited edition flavors for members only, and people want to be able to incorporate that into their existing case, like that to me is very exciting for the future in terms of what I would love to see technology do for us.

Kristen:

Yeah, and that sounds like it would be such a good asset to really have to be able to kind of switch up those flavors. Now, you mentioned something about the membership, and that you have select flavors only for members. This is something I want to touch on a little bit. This idea of membership versus just a standard subscribe, and save program where you get 10% off, and it's going to come automatically. It's that idea that when subscriptions first came out, convenience and price were the big drivers for people, and like you were saying with kind of a wine club, those aren't really the drivers for something.

Kristen:

So, you guys chose to go more of that kind of membership route. It is still a subscription program, but it has these extra perks. Can you kind of outline, one, what are those perks you're offering members and why you decided to go that way with it?

Helena:

Yeah. I think it's two fold, right? There's going to be a certain customer who at the baseline all they're going to get is subscribe and save. Maybe they live in the suburbs of a state in the middle of the country where we're never going to go host an event, and so for them, the benefit, and the driver is going to be the fact that they just have a discount, that they like really want four bottles a month, and they're able to do that, and get a discount on it, and that's their reward, and that's okay, and that's kind of why we wanted to just structure the program that way.

Helena:

We had some kind of journalists when we started first talking about this program where they're like, "Well, how much does it cost to join?" And, it's like nothing [inaudible]. It doesn't cost anything to join. It's like, "No, you actually save money." And, it was hard for people to kind of wrap their head around, which is funny, but again, like direct economics work so that you can afford to do something like that, and it's just loyalty. It's like, it's helpful. As a business we're trying to grow organically, majority organically, and we have grown majority organically, and an organic growth is much harder to predict, it's much harder to, it's just more volatile.

Helena:

And so, to be able to have retention be a big revenue driver, or as big as it possibly could is really helpful just to plan your business, and to have predictable revenue coming in and it's a much more sustainable way of going about it than like having an off month, and overspending on paid to make up for that number. I think, it's definitely just a foundation of a healthy organic business, but then for us it's also about, it just all intersects. Community is an amazing thing for us because so much, I mean, just from a brand foundation perspective, we're about getting together over a drink [crosstalk].

Helena:

We're not even like, I don't even think of us as company selling alcohol as much as we're selling people on this idea of drinking together in a better way, and it doesn't work unless you're getting together over a drink, right? Like [inaudible] work in a vacuum house works when you're with your friends and you're getting together with other people over a beverage. That's how all alcohol works theoretically in a healthy way, and so, for us, it's like we can't just talk the talk, we have to walk the walk, and the best way to help people really understand our product, and also, give them the easiest context ever to share it with their friends is to give them the opportunity to do that, and that's the kind of events and community component.

Helena:

It's one of those things where it's like, there's just so many different reasons to do it. It's like it's a loyalty reward thing, it is like giving people more context to understand the product thing. People can also bring their friends to this event, so it's like easy referrals, it's easy word of mouth growth, and it just helps provide another driver. If people are driven to be a member of something because of the programming just as much as the taste of the product, then let's go do that. Let's go give them more reasons to love it.

Kristen:

Yeah, and I love that, and I know you guys have invested a lot in your in-person events. You had one up in Denver that I unfortunately missed because Colorado loves to shut down highways when you need to get somewhere important, but what really is to you guys the importance of those in-person events? What are you really gaining from doing the kind of in real life stuff alongside with the eCommerce stuff?

Helena:

Yeah, I mean, gosh, where do I begin? It goes back a little bit to us talking about like the data, and then, the interviews kind of supporting that data. There's a lot of that dance happening here too, so when we're thinking about, okay, it's 2020, we're going into wholesale this year, we want to be in bars and restaurants, and we want to be where our customer's drinking. We could either be totally offline in our approach. We could give our product to a distributor, and make them do all the work. We could go and maybe read Eater, or The Infatuation, and try to get a decent idea of where people are eating and drinking.

Helena:

We could just even guess if those markets are viable markets to start with in the place. There's that approach, which seems incomplete in my opinion if you're a community developer, or you can do a combination of both. For us, we started with the numbers. We were able to say, "Okay, let's see where our biggest markets are." Like, okay, New York is huge, San Francisco's huge, LA is huge. What about these kind of mid tier cities or midsize cities? Where are we seeing some growth there? And so, we just did a little mini tour last month where we chose Seattle, Portland, and Denver as three midsize cities that we should go explore, because the data showed that we already had growth there.

Helena:

We already had fans and customers, and so that's a great start, but there still felt like missing pieces to the puzzle like, okay, we need to actually go and see what these markets are like. Are these markets growing, because we have people that deeply understand the product, and understand it, and are the key people that we'd love to drive community growth here? Is it just that...

Helena:

And of the key people that we'd love to drive community growth here. Is it just that for some reason this is a bigger city and a small percentage of the population found it? I don't know. We don't know. So we need to go find out. Until we went to those cities and part of it again was this like reward component, not just what can we take away but what can we give them.

Helena:

So we went and we'd host, we kind of had a playbook where we would spend two nights in those cities. One night we would host a VIP dinner and our basis there was us reaching out to our communities. I mean luckily Woody and I know a ton of people at this point in our life and we can say, "Hey, who should we know in Seattle? Who is doing really cool stuff? Who's a good person? Who are like the movers and shakers in these communities that we should go and like build friendships with and talk to them about where we should be?"

Helena:

So we would get a group of those people together for dinner, have an amazing dinner and just the goal is straight up to make friends, not to take anything from them. Like not to pick their brains, just like let's go have a great time and build some organic friendships with people and not even ask anything and just see like who at the end of those events comes back and is like, "Hey, I'm so into what you guys are doing. Let me know how I can help." That's where you start to find your real kind of early community advocates that you can really partner with on things.

Helena:

Then we would have a happy hour and that was kind of larger scale. We'd cap RSVPs at 300. We'd hit 300 every time and those are people who not just were already customers of the product and fans of the product, they were people who followed us on social media and we would also run a local ad on the event to completely new customers.

Helena:

So we kind of had a really diverse audience for those events and again, it was about rewarding those people. They'd get free drinks, they'd get to try the product if they'd been on the fence, they'd get to meet us. We got to talk to as many people as we could and just make friends and say hi and thank them for coming out.

Helena:

So again, it's about giving but then also there's a measurement component there where after those events are done, we can send a discount code to everyone who went to that event and we can see how many of those people convert to buyers.

Helena:

We can also, because we have their email and it's tied to their customer account, we can see how these different people behave as customers over time. So it's just data that keeps on giving. So after you know, a month or so, which is right around now, we're able to see, okay, it's been a month. All of these different people that we met and we have their information because we collected their emails, we can say, how many of these VIP did remember us. Ended up becoming customers. How many of the happy hour members became customers? How many of the people who are already customers ended up buying more products.

Helena:

We're just able to see kind of how these different cohorts behave and we just found out after kind of doing an analysis of the three cities, that Seattle by far, was the biggest converter after a visit.

Helena:

That's not even, like for us, we know that's more than just we run it out and it performed better. So much deeper than that. We went and we invested our time and we made friends and we like really, really put a lot into that city for a week. And we were able to see that we truly had impact in Seattle, Portland, and Denver. That doesn't mean Portland and Denver aren't our cities, it just means that in the greater, you know, there's finite amount of time and resources for an early startup, but we wouldn't have known that Seattle should absolutely be the first city that we prioritize unless we went and spent two days there and that's a huge return on two days of our time.

Kristen:

I would say so and it's really just, I mean it comes down to, I feel like it seems simple, but it's not a new idea, but it's just that this idea that when you add a human to human element to an eCommerce business, there is a wealth of opportunity of knowledge and information that you can get out of just adding a little bit more depth to what you're doing and getting in person with some people. I think it's just so, so powerful.

Kristen:

Just to wrap up, I've got a few more questions for you.

Kristen:

First, how many Bernese mountain dogs do you have?

Helena:

We have two Bernese mountain dogs.

Kristen:

What are their names?

Helena:

We have Rocco, who is a very big boy, and then we have his mom who is Rosie, who is a little bit smaller in the skeleton, but a little bit bigger in the belly.

Kristen:

Oh man. I was so excited to ask you because I have just, mean, one an obsession with all dogs, but Bernese, for some reason, me and my husband are both just like obsessed with them. They just looked like these big bears and I saw them on your Instagram and then the first time I emailed you I was just like, you have to tell me about the Bernese. So I was very excited to ask you about them.

Helena:

Oh yeah, they're good dogs. It's been a little hard because we've been driving or not driving, we've been flying back and forth. We've been spending a lot of time in New York because a lot of our team is there and so it's been kind of a hard year for keeping the whole family together. Luckily we have a big team who works on the farm every day, so they keep the dogs fed and happy and they just kind of run around with the crew all day. But it's definitely been moments where we're like should we just drive the dogs to New York all the time? Then we're like, I don't know man. This is getting really complicated. [crosstalk]

Kristen:

I mean we have three dogs and my husband and I have done the drive from Colorado to Texas and Colorado to Minnesota multiple times just to have our dogs with us. It's something that as you become a dog parent, I think eventually you're like, wow, I'm now that person that is driving my dogs 15 hours with me.

Helena:

Yeah. I mean dogs are great. They become even more great when you have a kid because you don't have to clean your floor anymore.

Kristen:

Ah.

Helena:

Because the baby will just throw their shit everywhere all the time and usually those things are edible by dogs and so when you have a dog, it's a really good ecosystem.

Kristen:

It's a built-in vacuum cleaner; like a Roomba without the plug.

Helena:

Yes. And much nicer.

Kristen:

And much nicer.

Helena:

[inaudible] feel good. Yeah. It's great.

Kristen:

Okay. Can you tell us maybe one of your favorite customer stories since you've kind of joined... Not joined, been building Haus.

Helena:

Oh my God. I mean, I think it's funny like we can't like advertise this stuff in particular because again, we don't want to like come off as some like woo woo health company. We're not, we're fricking alcohol company for people who drink, but we actually, we get quite a few emails from people who have, had like longstanding allergies to alcohol. They break out in hives. They can't seem to digest alcohol properly or they've had an autoimmune disease or they've had cancer or they've had like these health problems and alcohol makes them throw up and then they decide to give Haus a shot because they see that it's made of natural stuff and it's like it's the first alcohol that they've been able to drink.

Kristen:

Wow.

Helena:

That's pretty cool. Again, it's like we're never going to go lead with that as marketing language because it's just a handful of isolated case studies that we can't go and medically verify. But there's something. I mean it's also not totally surprising to us because Woody and I know how shitty most American alcohol is and how the pesticides and synthetic ingredients and things that like, yeah you should be getting hives because there's like really sketchy shit in your winery.

Helena:

But for us just on like a very case by case basis, like the fact that we're able to give people something to drink that doesn't ruin their life. It's cool.

Kristen:

It's really that idea that the product is not just the product in it or in it of itself but it has this entire context around it and for those customers, you're giving them access to an experience that they didn't have before, which is so, so powerful for consumers.

Helena:

Yeah. I mean that's the thing, right? It's like when people tell me, "Oh, like I gave your product as client gifts last year." Or, "I gave you a product as a wedding gift or whatever." That's really special to me because it's not just like we enabled that person. Our product was just a vehicle for that person to do a nice thing for someone else.

Helena:

I think when and I think there are several kinds of like iconic brand people, like you hear kind of the early days of Starbucks and the philosophies that drove Starbucks and it wasn't about the coffee, it was about people connecting over that coffee and the date that happened over that coffee or the proposal that happened over that coffee or the business that was done over that coffee. Those are the stories.

Helena:

That's the value prop that excites me more than anything. And again, it's back to like, it's not about the freaking drink. It's about [inaudible] happen over the drink. It's the friends that you made or the date that you had that turned into something bigger or the business deal that got done. All of those really positive things were already happening for me over drinks, right? Most of my career was built over drinks but I love that we are giving something that people are really proud to give to other people or to gift or to gather their friends around. That's exciting to me.

Kristen:

I think that is the most perfect place to end this interview because I think it brought us full circle to everything you guys are doing.

Kristen:

Thank you again Helena for being on, for being on now twice, two episodes, a part one and part two. I appreciate it so much. This was our most requested episode after season one went out, so I'm excited to hear how everybody thinks about it.

Kristen:

Seriously, thank you for bringing all of your knowledge, one to the podcast and two to the space. It's really fun to watch you guys grow.

Helena:

Oh my God, no problem. I hope I made some sense.

Kristen:

You did. We made lots of sense.