For four years Eric Steckling has run two direct-to-consumer brands. Brio, the company he founded in 2014, sells beard trimmers and related goods. In 2022, he acquired Ollie, then a seller of teeth-whitening strips and now expanded oral care items.
Eric first appeared on the podcast in 2023. In this our latest conversation, he addresses Brio’s challenges of selling long-lasting products, Ollie’s opportunity with consumables, and juggling the two.
The entire audio of our discussion is embedded below. The transcript is edited for clarity and length.
Eric Bandholz: Tell us what you do.
Eric Steckling: I’m the CEO of two direct-to-consumer brands: Brio, for men’s grooming, and Ollie, for oral care.
The problem with Brio is that our main product, a beard trimmer, lasts forever. It’s one of the reasons why I’ve focused on Ollie recently. Brio has a good initial order value. People love the product. It lasts a long time, so they don’t have to come back frequently. We also sell blades, dryers, and other tools, but we’ve learned our customers do not provide high long-term value. That’s been our challenge for the brand.
Ollie does not have those problems with its toothpaste, mouthwash, and whitening strips. All are replenishable products that folks use daily. That makes it easier to aim for a higher long-term value, which helps the marketing cycle.
Bandholz: How do you tell whether a slow-moving product missed the market versus needing better messaging?
Steckling: As long as we’re making changes and trying new approaches, we keep going. But if we get to a point where we don’t know what to change, maybe it’s time to stop.
Another challenge is whether to alter an existing product or launch a new one. For example, we rolled out a toothpaste with a new formula. It received more initial traction than we had planned, but many customers requested that we remove the fluoride.
I was on the fence, unsure of what to do. Ultimately, we did make the product fluoride-free because that is where the market was. Then the product took off.
So listening to customers is key because they’ll generally tell you what direction to go, although there are exceptions.
Bandholz: Ollie offers subscriptions. How do you minimize churn?
Steckling: It goes back to the product line. Ollie sells items that folks use multiple times per day, perfect for a fixed delivery cycle.
From there, we minimize churn by offering really good products. You’ve said Beardbrand doesn’t need many subscribers, so long as customers love the product and buy repeatedly. I’m on board with that approach, too. Minimize churn and elevate repeat sales with superior goods.
One of the challenges of being D2C is relying on our website and Amazon. At some point, to scale, we’ll probably go wholesale for the retail shelf exposure.
Bandholz: You and I both run bootstrapped businesses. We don’t have to deal with investors, but the trade-off might be passing up on a billion-dollar brand.
Steckling: It’s a good point. It mostly has to do with speed: how quickly do we get there? I’m not sure having investors would scale our D2C revenue any faster.
At Ollie, we’ve got a lot of room to grow with Meta, for example, as our primary customer acquisition channel. We have two other promising products: enzyme-based whitening strips and a mouthwash. And a priority is building an army of TikTok Shop affiliates.
All of those are better for us now than brick-and-mortar.
Bandholz: You bought Ollie from our mutual friend Aaron Marino. The company is different now from what you acquired.
Steckling: Yes, it is. Aaron’s business was whitening strips. At the time, Brio, our men’s grooming brand, sold Sonic toothbrushes alongside our beard trimmers. So I had a familiarity with the oral care space.
I initially tried to merge Ollie with Brio on the same website. Looking back, it makes no sense to combine those. Eventually I split them apart, with the whitening strip as Ollie’s core product.
Whitening is a big space. We’re not doing a good job of exploiting the opportunity, however. We have a unique, innovative product with enzyme-based whitening.
But I had no grand vision when we purchased the company. The more I learn about other entrepreneurs, the more I realize that few know what they’re doing at the start. You’re making decisions month-by-month and year-by-year of what seems right at the time.
I’ve never heard of anyone acquiring something like Ollie and 10 years later, still executing the same vision. It just doesn’t seem to work like that.
Bandholz: Where can people buy your products?
Steckling: For oral care, OllieSmile.com. For men’s grooming tools, Brio4life.com. I’m on LinkedIn.
