💼 How the Not-Dads behind Dad Grass Are Bootstrapping a DTC Brand Without a Brand Book

Good morning!

Today is something a little different. I’ve been wanting to pull back the curtain on what it takes to start, run, and grow a brand. So I opened my email and started hunting down cool people behind cool brands and the result is this! A cute new little series I’m calling Behind the Brand. And a huge thanks to Dad Grass for chit-chatting with me.

When I first wrote about Dad Grass, I thought: these guys are having fun. I don’t know about you but I think when someone has had a good time making something you can feel it in the work - the energy transfers. 🔮

I chatted with Ben and Josh, about how they build a brand that feels so fun. What I found out in today’s interview: having fun is one of their guiding lights (makes sense, no?)

What I love about these guys: they’re on the tools and they’re close to their customer. They’re answering phones, Josh is writing and Ben’s delivering product and getting on the design tools.They’re also bootstrapped: respect 🫡

We also chat about brand books (they don’t have one), their creative team (mostly them + pinch-hitting freelancers), picking up the phone and talking to customers, and their new truffle chocolates, which look delightful.

Enjoy! ✌️

Amanda Gordon: First things first…are you guys dads?

Ben Starmer: No, actually, neither one of us are dads. It's a vibe. Not necessarily a reality.

Joshua Katz: I'm trying to make it a reality. One of us had to step up. So I'm this weekend actually, I'm working on it all weekend. So maybe check back in two weeks and we'll see.

Amanda Gordon: Noted! How did you first start cooking up the idea of Dad Grass? 

Ben Starmer: The brand crystallized around this idea that today’s weed gets you too damn high.

Had you ever kind of heard the term dad weed? Historically, it was kind of like a pejorative term for weed your dad had stashed away for like two years and was saving for a special occasion.

For us it was the of grass that you know, you might have once found between your dad's records or something. So less about us being dads or the identity of dads but kind of more about that, and a throwback and nostalgia to something, simpler, something less aggressive, something kinder. Also, it was just it was just too good of a name to to pass up.

Amanda Gordon: Gotcha, I love that. So, brand folks love pyramids, onions, archetypes. How do you describe the concept of brand?

Joshua Katz: My initial answer, to be totally honest, is we haven't talked about brand as a meta concept. I don't think we even talk about it as a model we like for us. It is part of everything we do.

Ben Starmer: We are the products that we make, the experience that we offer, and that allows us to kind of avoid being a commodity. When you’re a commodity you’re in a race to the bottom.

Before we started selling anything that you could consume, we started selling hats and stuff like that. I think we have a pretty expansive notion of what Dad Grass can be.

Amanda Gordon: I love brands that almost build worlds. Like, what happens in Dad Grass land? Even landing on your website, you've got ashtrays, you've got hats, you've got all kinds of fun things.

When you moved from idea of Dad Grass to making it real, who did you call? What was the process?

Ben Starmer: It was a super fun process. It was a lot of Josh and I having really great conversations together. It was a lot of us going into our creative process and trying to pull out what this brand meant to us. It was a ton of mood boards. We had a really clear vision from the beginning.

I knew that I wanted our core product to look like a pack of cigarettes. And that it should you know, harken back, it should feel timeless if you saw it in a photograph from you know, any era from 1950 to now. So we had a really clear vision and then I guess we we started working with a handful of freelance designers and I picked up a bit here and picked up a bit there but it was it was largely internal.

Joshua Katz: We have a third partner Kevin, who has done like a lot of the mechanical work and continues to be very hands on. Even when working with a freelancer, we’d have them actually sitting right here with us. And so you know, I think started with a really clear vision and we kept it quite tight.

We're really hands on with like, material selection, and, you know, packaging production. Ben’s been on every single photo shoot we've ever done. We use the same photographer who's a longtime friend and collaborator of Ben's. I write all the copy but when I'm writing all the copy, it's now my voice, which is scary as shit, but hilarious.

There's another thing that Ben had said to me like early on when we're talking about like, how would we do like a bottle opener? Ben was like: “I want it to be like that bottle opener that's like being in a round in the junk drawer of like your, you know, your parents, your friend's parents cabin, like, not fancy or complicated. It could have been from the 70s 80s 90s or now, right?” 

These little things like that, like we've never like crystallized into like, “here's our brand book, okay, go and replicate it.” It's just like these little tidbits that have always kind of been these kind of guiding you know, parameters or inspirations and, you know, comes back to those things every time we start something new.

Amanda Gordon: I love that. There's so much mystery around brand and you know, you don't have a brand book you're writing.

Ben Starmer: I think you know, the question is how do you scale those things?

How do we let go of something that has been very much like, very personal, but should be actually, you know, even more kind of inclusive and expansive and I don't think it's like, oh, you write a brand book, right? And so you have to also invent your own mechanisms for allowing it to be kind of organic. I think that's the interesting point that we're at right now.

Amanda Gordon: I really do think that you can sense the fun that's happening inside a company on the outside, having been in companies where that's changed, for better or for worse. The VC model really shifts expectations for growth and what you can do, too.

Ben Starmer: We've gotten some wins, we've had some losses and I think, now we're in actually a really healthy position to grow at a faster rate. But also we don’t have this arbitrary kind of sense of demand for scale.

And that's, I think, what we've been working really hard to position ourselves on and a lot of that is brand. A lot of that stuff is stuff people never see: the people and how our team operates and how we have evolved as leaders and as partners. And that's, that's the hard stuff. That's not always fun. But, again, if you're not having fun, you know, when you're making these things or marketing these things, or telling your family and friends about it, then you're probably doing the wrong thing.

Joshua Katz: I think one of the huge kind of opportunities that we unlocked by, you know, pivoting to being you know, a hemp based cannabis company, was that we could spend the time that other people are spending on navigating this ever changing and very challenging regulatory infrastructure, building a brand telling stories, and of course, making great products. I have a certain amount of sadness for maybe unrequited potential in the cannabis brand space. A lot of my contemporaries and friends who had kind of come into this space at the same time, are not in it anymore because they couldn't build the brands and the experiences and the story they wanted to.

We've gotten to kind of do our thing on our own terms. We’ve bootstrapped it the entire time. And it's been difficult from time to time, but it's again, it's allowed us to do the things that we are into.

Amanda Gordon: Yeah, you’re not shackled by the same constraints.

Ben Starmer: We choose to have a kind of a healthy balance of building a brand and products that can endure and that, you know, aren't just chasing the latest thing or, you know, checking boxes on, you know, a fairly arbitrary best practices list.

Amanda Gordon: For sure. How do you stay in touch with your customers?

Ben Starmer: When we launched and the pandemic hit, I was delivering products all around LA and getting to meet people. Albeit at six feet distance and wearing masks. And we've continued that on you know, I was running the Instagram for a long time. So that was a constant dialogue. And then we were old school and we still have a customer service line that comes to me.

As often as I can I answer and, you know, talk with whoever's calling and so that's a lot of fun. We’re just trying to be as close to folks as we possibly can. And then, one of the things that we're, we're really working on and very conscious of how we’re speaking, having more of a dialogue rather than, unidirectional messaging.

Josh Katz: We also have a pretty unique wholesale like dealer network you know, because we don't sell in dispensaries. Those relationships have always been really, really important to us, because it's how we understand the first line of questions that we'll get from customers, “What's the difference between Mom Grass and Dad Grass,” those types of things.

And then you know, data. We are always trying to figure out how to ask the right questions of our data. For us, I think it's more natural to gather insights from a more human perspective than it is, you know, by looking at a dashboard and making assumptions, and we're trying to figure out the right balance of both, which I think everybody is.

Amanda Gordon: What advice do you have for founders considering whether and when to invest in brand?

Ben Starmer: I'd say invest a lot and do it early. That's not very eloquent. But yeah, it's just, it's just so important. 

Amanda Gordon: It’s tweetable. I like it. It’s a wrap!

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