Quest: End Chafing, Build a Brand
In today's episode, we meet Amy Tucker, the founder of Salty Britches, a skin care line. Amy begins her journey with a straightforward aim: to make her son's ocean trips enjoyable and chafe-free. As we follow her from her kitchen to scaling challenges and Shopify dashboards, we see how solving a simple problem can take unexpected turns. Fast forward, and she's navigating the complexities of co-packers, military contracts, and even winter skin relief. This episode isn't just a lesson in entrepreneurship; it's about the intricacies of human need, the power of relationships, the surprising pathways of invention, and the unanticipated lessons you learn along the way.
The Unofficial Shopify Podcast
9/5/2023
Kurt Elster: On today’s show, we are discussing a mother’s quest to end skin woes and build a brand. We’re joined by Amy Tucker, the founder of Salty Britches. Salty Britches. It’s such a good name. A brand born out of a mother’s need to help her son enjoy the ocean. So, today, I’m your host, Kurt Elster. Well, I suppose I’m your host on every episode of the show. I’m your host, Kurt Elster.
Ezra Firestone Sound Board Clip: Tech Nasty!
Kurt Elster: And this is The Unofficial Shopify Podcast.
Sound Board:
Kurt Elster: So, let’s hop on this roller coaster of brand creation, my friends. Amy, welcome. How you doing?
Amy Tucker: Thanks for having me, Kurt. I’m doing great.
Kurt Elster: I am thrilled to have you. We talked a few weeks ago about your store and some strategies, some vision, just giving you an outside perspective, but I really enjoyed it. You know, when I meet with someone and I enjoy the conversation, I think, “You know, I want to talk to them more, and also, let’s make some content out of that.” That’s really how we’re getting these podcast guests.
Amy Tucker: We come to you crawling and begging for help.
Kurt Elster: Oh my gosh.
Amy Tucker: And then you’re like, “Hey, there’s a story here.” And your help is great, by the way. It really did help.
Kurt Elster: Well, I’m glad to hear it. I don’t know about crawling and begging but I am happy to help. So, Salty Britches, let’s start with what it is. What’s your store? What do you sell?
Amy Tucker: Right. So, Salty Britches, it’s a solution to saltwater chafing. We thought originally this was just a coastal solution for the ocean, for anyone that suffers from the painful irritation from spending any time in saltwater. Little did we know this would completely go a different direction than we anticipated, but now we’re working a lot in the endurance space, running, any kind of backcountry hiking, climbing, and we also work with the U.S. military. So, we have found that our customer is really that go-getter that really is putting themselves in some difficult, painful if you will, situations where they’re just trying to get better and work really, really hard, and that can cause a lot of friction, blisters on your feet, or just general chafing from spending time out in the elements.
And what we discovered really by accident when our son was about six years old, he really wanted to play in the ocean, and boogie board, and we’d go on vacation. We live in South Carolina. And we would vacation on the coast, and within five minutes of him playing in the ocean, he was so miserable that he wanted to go back to the room or go to the pool. It was always this back and forth, back and forth, and after we’d shuck all the stuff to the beach, he wanted to turn around and go back to the room because he was in so much pain from this chafing.
So, we started on this quest to find a solution and we tried all the things, and nothing really worked in saltwater. It didn’t work very well. It didn’t last very long, or it would transfer to his board, or it was white, and he would suffer, and get it under his arms, and on his chest, and he didn’t want to wear a rash guard because that made it worse, so he just said, “You know, I want something that’s clear, that will last all day in the ocean, it’s not sticky, and doesn’t attract sand,” so those were my marching orders. And after a couple of years of not finding a solution, I just took to my kitchen and blended a solution that worked for him, and then it worked for a lot of the other people that we would vacation with, and then word got around that I made this goo, and demand kind of went nuts, so we find ourselves completely torn of what to do.
I had a full-time career, a completely different life, very comfortable in my career, and my husband was too, and in our typical life, in just a suburban neighborhood, and now here we are with a product that we created just for our kid and people found out about it, so we had to decide. Do we keep going with this and do we make this a real product? Or do we pull the plug? Because it just about killed us both to do the full-time career and then this little side gig of Salty Britches. So, that’s kind of the short and dirty story of how we got here.
Kurt Elster: So, how long has this been going on? When did you start?
Amy Tucker: Gosh. I made it… My son is 17, so he was six years old when we first took to the kitchen, and I say we because it was really kind of a family affair with my husband and I blending and filling. I have a chemistry background, so I had a little bit of knowledge of what to do, some knowledge on different raw materials, and that just came from a chemistry degree, and a 20-year career in pharmaceuticals, and engineering.
So, he was around six years old, so we blended and experimented with this formula for four years without anyone knowing we even were doing this. You know, I didn’t know this was even a solution to a larger problem. This was just for my kid. That was my only concern. So, we did that for four years, and then in 2017 people found out about it and started communicating with me and messaging me on Facebook. I didn’t even have an Instagram. I had a love-hate relationship with social media. I had zero followers. It was not a thing.
And then people started messaging us. So, in 2018 we had decided, “All right, we’re gonna go all-in.” And we sold everything we owned. We sold our home. We took our kid out of private school, moved him to public school, and moved to a tiny house, and bootstrapped the whole thing. So, that’s how long it’s been going on, and here we are 2023. We’ve had a real business, with all the real things associated with it, for about five years. But in fact, we’ve been doing this a lot longer than five years.
Kurt Elster: So, when you first created this product, when it was just a thing you made in your kitchen for your kid to do something that they enjoyed, like I would bend over backwards if my kid said, “There is a physical activity outdoors that I will do if you could just solve this one truly terrible problem of chafing.” Chafing, the worst. Nobody wants chafing.
Amy Tucker: And nobody wants to talk about chafing, which is so funny, but nobody wants it. It is super painful, and it can really screw up your adventure or whatever you’re doing, whether it’s playing soccer, which he did, or playing any kind of sports, or going outside for a hike. I mean, when you experience chafing or blisters on your feet, that’s a dealbreaker. You know, you’re done. You don’t want to keep going. It hurts.
Kurt Elster: You know, in entrepreneurship, I have been exposed to an entire world of products that exist to prevent chafing because it is a… It’s a true pain to solve, right? Thigh Society sells underwear, long, like bike-style shorts that prevent thigh chafing. Lovingly, they call it chub rub, which I’ve always enjoyed. A whole… Runners, for sure, have this stuff. Lots of products out there to prevent chafing.
None of those were gonna work? Because this is like a saltwater-specific application?
Amy Tucker: Bingo. This turned out to be… Cracking the code for this turned out to be a really big deal. No, none of those other products held up in saltwater. They would initially, for maybe 10 minutes, and then it was a constant reapplication. Fabric, we discovered, so… Fabric is woven, and that’s more surface area, so when you get out of saltwater, the water evaporates, the salt ions are left behind, and there’s more surface area in fabric for them to cling to, which made the problem even worse. So, if you’re already irritated and then you have on say a rash guard, and they’re not all created equal. Some rash guards are better than others. Some bathing suits are better than others. And they are getting better at trying to find fabric. But it’s still surface area.
So, because our kid was just so extra sensitive, it didn’t matter what the fabric was. It was just making it worse. So, he tried basketball shorts. He tried underwear, no underwear, the rash guards, no rash guards. We did everything from Vaseline, to A&D, Body Glide, I mean… There are countless options. But the first thing we did was to make our way to the fancy surf shop. Surely, this is a problem that affects more than just my son. Do they have any solutions?
Kurt Elster: You guys went down to Ron Jon? The only surf shop I know.
Amy Tucker: Well, no. We went… We were in Folly Beach, in Charleston, South Carolina, and Mc Kevlin’s, which is one of the oldest surf shops on the East Coast, still there, and still sells Salty Britches, that’s where we went. So, we were like, “If anybody’s gonna know, these guys will.” So, I go in, I’m like, “Do you guys have anything for this? He’s so miserable.” And they’re like, “We know it’s a problem. We hear about it all the time. Just go to the local CVS and get some diaper cream.” So, we did that. Miserable. It was a white paste, a zinc paste, which is exactly what you need for diaper rash, but it is sticky, and it smears, and he didn’t want people to see the white under his arms, and it would transfer to his board, and sand would stick to it. It just made the problem worse.
So, it was just the fact that it was the ocean, which is an extreme condition, with a high amount of salt ions, and minerals, and all that grit that is just rubbing your skin raw. So, that turned out to be the most difficult challenge when it came to chafing and that was our goal, to prevent that. And so, that’s how it translated into triathlon and ultra running. These people are spending time in the ocean, they’re getting out of the ocean, and they’re going through a transition to get on their bike, and then they go from the bike to the run, so they go from saltwater, to sweat, and that is a gnarly combination for chafing. And there are lots of products in the triathlon world, but something that you don’t have to reapply that will withstand all of those conditions, that’s how we made a name for ourself in that space, and then it grew into the ultra-running space, where people are running 50 and 100 miles at a time, which I didn’t know was a thing.
Ultra running is… There’s a huge following. There’s a ton of people that do it. It’s an incredible space. But these people are running very long distances and they needed a product that they didn’t have to constantly reapply that could withstand water crossings, withstand high heat, high humidity, and that’s the other trick is that we’re an East Coast formulated brand, and a lot of these competitors are West Coast formulated, dry, arid climates. And it was that high humidity and high heat that was such a challenge using those products.
So, that’s what we had to overcome to create a product that could withstand those gnarly East Coast conditions.
Kurt Elster: My wife’s a Disney blogger and she did a whole bit to try and solve a similar problem for herself. She lovingly called it the boob cream tests. How do you solve under boob sweat? And she tested… She bought like all the products off Amazon, tested them by applying them in the park, and made it… She did it for her podcast and it was really funny. But where she had like one on the left, one on the right, and took notes. And for sure, the products were not created equally. And okay, that’s an antiperspirant, different thing, but they were just all over the place. I consider myself a do-it-yourselfer, but there’s no world in which I would ever say, “You know what? I’m gonna go formulate an anti-chafing product in my kitchen.”
Amy Tucker: I didn’t think so, either.
Kurt Elster: What possessed you? What… Did you have some background? Have you done this before? I mean, like truly, that one is out there.
Amy Tucker: It is out there, isn’t it? I know. It is crazy. No, I had no… I’ve never done anything like this before. That’s how desperate I was to solve it for my son. My six year old was so miserable, so of course that in turn made me miserable. I just wanted to hang out on the beach and let my kid swim in the ocean and not cry his eyes out every time we went on vacation. It was creating anxiety for the whole family. He really, really suffered, even more so than other kids did.
So, it was just out of a desperate need to fix it. We came home from a really bad vacation where he was so miserable, and I had just had it. So, while we were at the beach and we were talking to the surf shops, and trying all the different products, and… I mean, we had gone through years of that. I came home and I’m like, “I’m just gonna fix this.” And I knew… I have this love for lanolin. Lanolin is an amazing raw material that comes from the wool of sheep. And any woman that’s breast fed is familiar with lanolin. And lanolin most closely mimics the lipids in human skin more than anything in nature, and like attracts like, so I thought, “That’s a natural place to start. Let me just start with lanolin.”
And lanolin alone is hard to use. It’s hard to spread. It’s really thick. Super sticky. It’s just kind of a pain. And all lanolins are not created equal, so I went through that phase of settling on a lanolin from a humane farm that I really liked, so I started with lanolin and then I just started adding other products that would help get to the final product to meet all of his demands. And I say that in a funny way because he was six, so if anybody’s around a six year old, you know they can be demanding. But it could-
Kurt Elster: They have opinions, for sure.
Amy Tucker: Yeah. It couldn’t be white. It had to be clear. He didn’t want anyone to see it on his skin. You know, because he’s big, bad, and six years old. I mean, I’m not gonna walk around the beach and somebody can see I have cream all over me. Sunblock is bad enough to get a kid to put on. So, it couldn’t be white, and it couldn’t attract sand, because like I said, he was doing… playing on a boogie board, and rolling around in the sand, and digging in the sand, and doing all the sandy things, and that just makes it more miserable if it’s gonna stick to everything like Vaseline does.
So, it couldn’t stick to sand, or sand couldn’t stick to that, and it had to last. If I had to constantly get him to reapply it, he wasn’t gonna do it. He wasn’t gonna use it. This is something that had to bond to the skin, that was my goal, and it could last. So, I’d mix up the goo, and we went to the beach a few times that year. Every summer, we go a couple of times, and we’d go with other families. So, we went on this particular next trip, and I had a Tupperware container of my goo, and Trent, my son, puts it on in all the places, especially under his arms, his chest, his groin. We don’t give it another thought. Like, “Here, use this so you can go play in the ocean.” Well, then the other moms asked me about it, and so I’d pass around the Tupperware container in all the condos, and all the moms would let their kids use it, and then the dads wanted to use it, and then the moms were kind of using it, and finally we were all sitting in a circle on the beach and all the kids had been in the water for hours. It had not occurred to me that they hadn’t gotten out of the water complaining, or walking like a cowboy, there were no crocodile tears. It was just not even a thing anymore.
And I thought, “Okay, great. We can hang out on the beach. All the parents are hanging around, solving all of life’s problems, the kids aren’t getting out of the water,” and one of the moms said, “You need to tell people about this. You need to post on Facebook that you have a solution to this.” And I’m like, “Are you crazy? This is not a thing. This is just my son really suffered, and this stuff works for him, and that’s the end of that.” She’s like, “No, I’m telling you, there’s a need for this.”
Kurt Elster: So, you’d found the solution that worked. You had developed it yourself to solve this pain, this problem in your own life, and you got these other people that are like, “Hey, this works.” You know 100% you have a solution that works here. And even then, you got other people telling you, “Hey, other people need to know. Get this secret out. We have solved this problem that everybody who’s spent any kind of time in the ocean has discovered.” How did that feel?
Amy Tucker: Annoying. You know, I had a busy life. The last thing I wanted to do is open this can of worms. Like, I wasn’t interested in it. I’d solved it for my kid, and yeah, other families that were with us, and that was good enough for me. I’m a reluctant entrepreneur, Kurt. But we did, we put it out on my Facebook page. Hey, moms. If you’re getting ready to go to the beach and your kids suffer from this, I have a solution. Well, holy cow. I had over 700 comments, instant messages, text messages. I didn’t even have 700 friends on Facebook. All these shares. It was bonkers.
Right there on the beach, that’s when the lightbulb went off. Oh my gosh. If I have to make all of this when I get home, I need to set up an LLC and a bank account so that I can order raw materials and I can do this the right way. So, right there on the beach I set up an LLC. Right there on the beach, I opened a new checking account. And right there on the beach, we named it Salty Britches. All that day.
Kurt Elster: You know, coming up with a name is the really hard part. I can’t believe it’s just like, “Boom, Salty Britches, named it.”
Amy Tucker: I mean, we were sitting around as a bunch of parents, and I knew I wanted Britches in the name. I mean, you can’t come up with a more southern term than britches. And somebody said salty. I think it was one of the dads. And I’m like, “Salty Britches. That’s it.” Everybody said, “That’s it. That’s the name of it. Done.”
So, we named it, and I instantly started working on a trademark for the name right there on the beach. All of this was happening that one day.
Kurt Elster: You did like a full 180 here. What was the thing that made you decide to turn this into a business? Because you were reluctant, resistant until you weren’t. You went like, “No, absolutely not,” to, “I’m all in.”
Amy Tucker: Well, it wasn’t quite all in until about a year later, but the lightbulb went off when all of those people on Facebook started asking me, “What is it? How do I make it? How do I buy it? Where can I get it?” Holy cow. There really is a need here. These people need this stuff. What am I gonna do? Just tell them, “No, I’m sorry, I’m not gonna make it for you.” I mean, I’m not gonna do that, so that’s when the lightbulb went off that, “Hey, there’s a real market for this.”
So, I thought, “Well, this is just a really small niche market. This is not really a thing.” I just knew I had to order a lot of expensive raw materials and I wanted to be able to write it off on my taxes. So, that’s why I set up the LLC. That was the process in my mind of, “Okay, what is the right way to order this stuff and to be able to pay for it?”
Kurt Elster: You know, depending on the state, LLCs are varying levels of difficult to create. Like in Illinois, they’re extremely easy. They’re just a little pricey on the fee. Did you use a service? Or you were comfortable just filling out the application with the Secretary of State? How’d it go?
Amy Tucker: No, I actually went on Legal Zoom and did it.
Kurt Elster: Okay. That’s how I did mine the first time.
Amy Tucker: Yeah. The first time. And then all the attorneys when you get deeper and bigger are like, “Oh, no. Don’t use Legal Zoom.”
Kurt Elster: They’re like, “Why’d you waste your money?”
Amy Tucker: Legal Zoom was awesome for me in the beginning because it also provided the pathway for the LLC and access to a trademark attorney at a pretty nominal fee. So, that’s where I started. I would do it that way again if I was going to create a new business. It really helped open my eyes to what was all required. The organization, the organization agreement. I mean, there’s so many things that your state requires, articles of organization, lots of things, and Legal Zoom walked me through every bit of that.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. They just do it. You just pay, like, “Here’s the flat fee,” and then they handle it and you’re good.
Amy Tucker: Yeah. It was very, very easy, surprisingly.
Kurt Elster: So, once you’ve got that out of the way, and smart that you started with an LLC, because it’s just… Filing your taxes and offers some legal protection, like at day one you did that, and you nailed the brand name, and you’ve got the validation of the product. I mean, just like the stars have aligned here. But now you gotta get into product development, because just cranking it out in your kitchen in Tupperware, you can’t ship that.
Amy Tucker: Yes.
Kurt Elster: How do you go from kitchen experiments to a proper consumer product?
Amy Tucker: That’s exactly right. That’s what you have to do. So, my husband has a background in manufacturing, and-
Kurt Elster: Oh, again.
Amy Tucker: And I had a little… I know, right?
Kurt Elster: Just fate.
Amy Tucker: I know.
Kurt Elster: Fate. This was meant to be.
Amy Tucker: Well, it was all God, divine intervention in my opinion. I mean, I had a background in manufacturing a little bit, and then a pharmaceutical background, so we decided to call around to different co-packers or manufacturers for cosmetic products. I knew I didn’t need a drug label for this, so a cosmetic label was gonna be fine, and I wanted it made in the USA. That was really important to me. So, we started calling co-packers/manufacturers and they all laughed me off the phone, like, “How many do you think you need?” “Oh, I don’t know. 500.” And they’re like, “Oh my gosh. When you get to 50,000, call us back.”
Like, “No.” Thanks, but no thanks. Way too small.
Kurt Elster: It’s always that minimum order quantity gets you at the start.
Amy Tucker: Yes. So, one really nice co-packer said, “I’ll tell you what you do. You go online, do a request for information for cosmetic co-packer manufacturer,” which is what I did. I googled it. Found the request for information. Put out what I needed. “Hey, I’m just getting started. I have a product I’ve developed, and I need to find someone that can blend it and fill it and put it into jars, tubes,” whatever I wanted to do. I had one manufacturer reply and they were in a little tiny town of Mabel, Minnesota. And they were the nicest people and they said, “Look, we can help you get started. You can even use our sample line.” So, we set up a call with these guys in Minnesota, and myself, and my husband, and they asked us what we were doing. We signed NDAs, all of that, so I could talk to them about my formula, and they said, “Is your formula perfect? Do you think it’s exactly what you want?” I said, “No, I actually need a little help with the stability of it.”
Because my formula melted, and I didn’t want it to melt at such a low temperature. They said… This was also by chance. This is just God directed. They said, “We have a contract chemist who’s a cosmetic chemist that’s a friend of ours and that’s who you need to talk to first.” So, I looked her up, her name’s Tammy, and she was in Iowa, and I called Tammy and I said, “Hi, Tammy. I have this product, I’ve blended it, and it’s not quite what I want. I think I need some help tweaking the formula and I want to fly to Iowa and come meet you.” Now, she is in the middle of nowhere ville, Iowa. She’s like, “Well, people don’t typically come here. I have a lab here and normally we just kind of ship products back and forth.” I said, “No, no. I’m coming to Iowa.” And I took my son, who at the time I think was maybe eight or nine.
We flew to Iowa, rented a car, my son and I drove from Cedar Rapids to nowhere ville, Iowa, and go to her lab, and sit down across from her. She’s got this dry erase board behind her that is slapped full of products that you and I know very well, so she is known across the country as the guru of stability. So, products that have trouble with the formulas will contact her to help figure out their formula and she is independent. Now, this is important because most co-packers have chemists on staff and if they fool with your formula, tweak it, or whatever, there are clauses in there where they may own your formula. So, if you’re doing anything like this, be very aware and read all the fine print. Hire the lawyers. Let them read the fine print.
I got really lucky because I did not know any better, but I met Tammy very early on in this process. So, we tweaked the formula while I was there. It took her five minutes. It was a simple tweak. And I’m just a total science chemistry nerd anyway, and I wanted my son to be that way. He’s not. Let me tell you that. The kid could care less about anything to do with beakers and pipettes. Give him a ball and he’s good to go, but science, forget it. We learned that on that trip. He was so bored.
But we’re in the lab blending, and filling, and tweaking, and playing, and got it exactly like I wanted it, so I sat down with Tammy, and I said, “Tammy, I need to tell me. Am I barking up the wrong tree here? Is this something I need to pursue, or do I just need to pull the plug? Because this can really be a big expense.” She said, “No, absolutely, you need to pursue this. I believe 100% you have a product here and there’s a market for it.” She just kind of spoke life into it.
So, we go home from that trip, I’ve nailed down the formula, signed the NDAs, and send it to the co-packer, and they want to run us on their sample line, which they do, and then I fly to meet them in Minnesota, and I sit down with them. I look at the products. I’m pretty happy with it. I’m just gonna order about 2,000 of them, which is way more than I thought I needed. Well, I get-
Kurt Elster: It’s way less than 50,000, though.
Amy Tucker: Right? I know. I get the first box shipped to our house and it’s a big thing. I call all the family in. Our first product. We’re gonna open the product. And about half of them were so bad I couldn’t sell them. The way they had sealed the tubes, they had twisted the labels around and it wasn’t straight. I had about 1,000 tubes that were so crooked I could not have put them on any shelves. It was… They were not sellable.
The very next day, I get a call from someone that has something to do with special forces, and they’re near where we’re located, and they wanted to have lunch with me, and they had gotten word about this product, had gotten some homemade samples of the product, and they wanted to know if I could make it in a black tube. And it was the military.
Kurt Elster: So, you haven’t even gotten to sell it yet and already the armed forces have shown up and are like, “Hey, can you make the mil-spec version of this?”
Amy Tucker: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Oh. Incredible.
Amy Tucker: I had product out there that I had blended and poured in my kitchen and a local market in town sold that. They were watching what had happened on Facebook and all this communication on Facebook of Salty Britches, you can go to Amy’s house and pick it up out of a cooler on her front porch, which is exactly what I did. People would put their money in the cooler and get a jar out of the cooler.
Kurt Elster: Oh, that’s so fun.
Amy Tucker: I was going nuts trying to figure out how to meet this demand, and communicate with all these people, and work full time, and travel all the time. It was crazy. So, this little market saw it and said, “Hey, why don’t you let us sell your product here?” And I’m like, “Thank you, Lord. Yes.” So, I took a bunch of it to them. Corley’s Market in Greenwood. And then there was 105 West, which was a little boutique in Abbeville, in a neighboring town. Both of those stores took it from me, and people came and bought it there, so it at least got them off my front porch.
And that’s where these guys found the product, was at that local market, and then I had lunch with them. I had no idea who they were, and I thought, “Well, yeah. I’m sure I could make it in a black tube. I mean, I can barely make it in any tube right now. I have 1,000 tubes, in fact, that I cannot sell. Do you want them?” And that was my first donation to the military, and I donated those 1,000 tubes that were twisted, and messed up, and they said, “We don’t care what it looks like as long as the stuff is the stuff. We don’t care what the tube looks like.”
So, that’s how I started that relationship with those guys who are still in my life. They actually helped me write the copy on the black tube, came up with the logo for the military, and it’s just been off to the races ever since.
Kurt Elster: Do you sell the military version?
Amy Tucker: I do. Yes. It’s the same product as the blue. Yes. Just marketing with their tube.
Kurt Elster: That’s cool. Is it the same price?
Amy Tucker: Yep. Everything’s the same except for the fragrance, which is a funny story, because the military guys, the fragrance I chose was rose oil in our blue chafing ointment. Rose oil is a natural anti-inflammatory, so that’s why I went… And the only reason I put that in there is because you don’t want to smell like cod liver oil, and you don’t want to smell like lanolin. Neither of those are very nice.
Kurt Elster: Yeah.
Amy Tucker: So, to neutralize that, I put rose oil in it. Well, the military guys thought it was too sissy. So, I gave them the choice. Do you want rose oil, or do you want a berry oil? Both basically do the same thing. They just have slightly different… You really don’t smell it. It’s just enough to neutralize the fragrance. And they chose the berry oil. And that’s the only difference in the products, so it’s just packaging and fragrance.
Kurt Elster: I like that berry, they’re like, “All right, that’s fine, but rose oil, get out of here.”
Amy Tucker: That’s exactly how the conversation went, which was so funny. And really, I almost feel like shoot, I should have just said, “Suck it up. You’re gonna deal with the rose oil.” Because now I have a whole nother SKU and a whole nother formula, and the changeover for this at the co-packer is much more complicated because now I have a different formula. So, they have to empty the machine so they can put the new formula in, so that little tweak made a world of difference in efficiency and changeover. Our formula is what’s called anhydrous. There’s no water in it. So, there’s only a few co-packers in the country that will work with anhydrous because it’s a pain. It’s a pain. And changeover, and efficiency, and all of those things are part of the price that you have to pay to work with a co-packer.
So, I’ve learned an awful lot, but the formula just works. I wouldn’t change it. But it’s funny because we got that start and I started my website and-
Kurt Elster: I was gonna ask. When do we start selling the stuff online?
Amy Tucker: Yeah. Shortly thereafter. And let me tell you, I was clueless about a website. You know, everybody has an opinion about it, but there was a local guy in town who is the smartest guy ever. His name is Andy Johnston. He’s so smart and he had built a lot of websites for people. So, naturally I called him, and I said, “I need to build a website.” He said, “Okay.” And he knew the whole story and what was happening. He said, “We’re gonna use Shopify because it’s by far the best option and has the most… Well, it has most things that you need as far as building the website goes. Let’s do Shopify.”
So, I’m like, “Okay. That’s how we’ll do Shopify.”
Sound Board:
Amy Tucker: Yep. So, he helped me build our first website. That was an amazing experience too. And then I actually went and hired a guy to help do a lot of the apps, and the add-ons, and things that we needed to build on the backend. He helped me do a lot of that. So, between those two we got our website up and running. So, that’s how we got started there, and then I started shipping.
Now, we have never done ads. Like I told you in the beginning, I have kind of a love/hate relationship with social media. I just didn’t want to give them any of my money that I really didn’t have. So, at this point we had not even sold our home, or moved to a tiny house, and really figured out how we were gonna bootstrap the thing. That came after the website creation. Because here I go. Okay, now all of a sudden these people are finding us simply from word of mouth and regular social media, not ads, and I shipped product to Syracuse, New York, and mind you, I had no idea who these people were. They turned out to be hockey players. Well, they emailed me and said, “We cannot squeeze this out of the tube. It’s too cold here. The product has solidified, and we can’t squeeze it out.”
And I thought, “Oh, no.” That’s not a problem in the South. But up there, it was a problem. So, that day I contacted my chemist in Iowa, and I said, “All right, I gotta tweak the formula again because I need a version for winter that won’t freeze.” And that became our third SKU, winter skin relief. It won’t freeze in the cold but will melt in the heat. The blue and the black tubes won’t melt in the heat but will freeze in the cold. And it was the result of sending it to Syracuse, New York, to those hockey players.
So, that started a whole avalanche of projects, so at that point I really thought I’m gonna lose my mind. I’m working full time. My son plays all these sports. We’re super, super busy. And I’m spending every waking second on Salty Britches. What are we gonna do? So, I go to my husband and he’s like, “We can’t not do this.” And now, he’s really risk adverse. I’m the one that is all for change. I’m very open to risk, willing to do whatever it takes. He’s much more methodical, and analytical, and he’s like, “We’re gonna do this. We’re gonna sit down and make a plan.” So, we decided to sell our home, sell… I had a sale in my basement with all of my clothes, and shoes, and purses, and all the junk. We sold everything. We had a little, tiny house that was in our family that was on a lake that had no closets, no washer and dryer. It was a cabin. It was a weekend cabin. That’s where we moved.
And then we took our kid out of private Christian school and moved him to public school in a new town, where he didn’t know a soul. All of that played a role into our story, but that’s how we bootstrapped the business. We just sacrificed all of it.
Kurt Elster: You really, truly went all-in.
Amy Tucker: 100%. Yeah. Greatest thing we ever did. Best decision we ever made.
Kurt Elster: Sounds like it paid off.
Amy Tucker: Hardest thing we’ve ever done, by far.
Kurt Elster: Oh, for sure.
Amy Tucker: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: And when you say tiny house, do you mean like those small houses that can fit on a trailer? Or just like a smaller house?
Amy Tucker: It’s a very small house but it was built in 1982, so it was a tiny house before tiny houses were cool. Much less amenities than the newer tiny houses that they have these days. Yeah. There’s a loft upstairs where my son sleeps and then there was an extra room there that we made a closet for the family. We have one bathroom, a galley, little, tiny galley kitchen. It’s small. And we have loved every second of it.
Now, what’s really funny is we moved into this tiny house and the property next door was owned by a family, never to be sold. They knew our story. They knew what we were doing. We were able to buy six acres that was attached to that little, tiny house, and we built a pole barn, and in the pole barn we built a laundry room, and I’m talking to you right now from that pole barn. This is our headquarters. This is where we store our product, we ship our product, our employees come and work here, and they fill product here. I have a makeshift lab here. Yeah. It’s become the headquarters, and this is still where we do everything.
Kurt Elster: That’s super cool.
Amy Tucker: And we’re in the backyard of the tiny house.
Kurt Elster: I love it.
Amy Tucker: So, we literally… I can drive up the hill with my laundry, which I do every day, and wash clothes while I’m working in the office, and it just has fit our family so perfectly. We call it the shop. That’s what we call it. People visit here. They come here, and meet with me here, and we’re in the middle of nowhere, too, which is kind of a challenge for obvious reasons. We had transfer trucks delivering product and now we’re banned from having transfer trucks because we’re down a hill and the transfer truck tries to leave the driveway, and the little legs that you put down on the ground when you drop the trailer, they dug into the asphalt of the highway all the way across the highway, and we blocked traffic in both directions for about four hours.
Needless to say, we can’t have transfer trucks, so now when we do deliveries, it’s box truck only or then we go pick up whatever it is with a trailer. There’s been some things we’ve had to do to kind of figure out what our capabilities are here. But we’ve overcome them. It’s been a great thing. And now, we’ve grown so much, and we have a co-packer in Dallas that we work with that is going to be our fulfillment center, as well, so the product actually won’t come here. That’s something we grew out of, of having to figure out all of those logistics, and so now our co-packer can handle all the big shipments and we never touch it.
Kurt Elster: There are some consistent themes here. You know, it’s you have a pain or problem in your own life. We see this with so many entrepreneurial stories. And there’s no good solution. You’re able to solve it. Then you see the need, other people asking for it. Certainly, there’s some fate. Some stars aligned action there. But I think one of the things that’s so important here is you’re like… Repeatedly, you said, “Oh, they heard our story, they knew our story, they knew about us.” There’s a story here. People love stories. We’re like… For thousands of years, we are storytellers. And so, when you have a compelling story that goes with the brand, and they can put a face to it, they can put a family to it, that I think is really important. And that helps drive your success because it becomes viral. It becomes meme-like, where they’re able to share it by attaching the story to the product. And that helped you so much combined with your vision, your willingness to do the work, and to do it in a careful way, where you said, “Hey, we’re gonna go all-in,” and you said your husband’s risk averse, and so by meeting in the middle you were able to come up with this very sane plan of, “Hey, let’s downgrade our lifestyle to free up the cash flow to invest in the business that we’re going all-in on.”
I’m sure that was scary.
Amy Tucker: Oh, that’s an understatement. We just were convinced. We have such a belief. And really, what did it for us is when we were hearing from people we did not know, and they would go out of their way to email us, or contact us, or call us, or send us a message on social media, and we did not know these people, so that’s when it really hit me. Okay, this is real. This is not just friends and family that are patting me on the back, “Good job. Nice product. We love it.” I love those people, but I don’t believe those people because, you know, they’re friends and family. But when it’s strangers and they’re messaging you, okay, you know that you need to do more with this. But it is extremely frightening because it’s so far out of the comfort zone. It’s not normal. And your whole life is gonna shift. And that includes people in your life, because people are gonna think you’re crazy. There’s gonna be a lot of that. And you have to be okay with that.
And that was really hard in the beginning because somewhere in there I thought I was crazy, like, “What is happening here? How is this forcing me down this path whether I want to go down it or not?” And it did. It just felt like it was such a supernatural draw that I could not have argued my way out of it. I just had to do it. And that… It was that pull that I knew, “All right, I’m on the path I’m supposed to be on.” And we’ve been all-in and it’s cool, and I knew we were good when my seventh grader, after he moved to the new school, who did not know a soul in a country school where these kids have been friends since they were in kindergarten, and my son’s the outsider coming in, and he comes to us and he says, “It’s cool.” Because he didn’t get invited to the things. All these kids were getting together, and he was getting left out. And that about killed me. That about made me want to quit. But he came to me, and he said, “It’s okay. I know this is the role I have to play.”
Now, that does not come from a seventh grader.
Kurt Elster: Wow.
Amy Tucker: And that was… It almost felt like, “Well, that’s just divine.” Because that’s how he feels about it and that’s how he’s coping with it. That’s how we know, all right, we’ve gotta keep going. We’re on the right track here. So, that made a difference for us when we knew he was okay. But yeah, it was a sacrifice, and it was extremely scary, but aren’t the best things always on the other side of that?
Kurt Elster: 100%.
Amy Tucker: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Amy, what’s next for Salty Britches?
Amy Tucker: Oh, gosh. I wish I had a crystal ball. We just keep climbing the mountain. I mean, we’re just gonna keep going. We’re not gonna stop. You know, we’ve grown, and gotten the attention of some pretty heavy hitters. We’re actually gonna be spending some time with Iron Cowboy, James Lawrence in October. I’m super excited about that. He’s a fan of Salty Britches. If you don’t know Iron Cowboy, he did 100 full distance triathlons 100 days in a row last year. There’s documentaries on him.
Kurt Elster: Whoa.
Amy Tucker: Yeah. We’re meeting people that have put themselves in extreme circumstances, doing extreme things, running across America. Gosh, I don’t know how many people we’ve met that have run across the country. There’s a guy right now, Jeff Spire. He has got a huge following. He’s a first form athlete. He loves Salty Britches, uses Salty Britches on his feet and his body to run across America. This has been a real up level for us, just the people that are using our product. So, we’re gonna do live events, which we’ve been doing from the very beginning. We do live races. We’ll be at the Georgia Jewel in September, which is a 100-mile race through the North Georgia mountains. We’ll work some aid stations there. We meet our customers. You know, we’ve developed these relationships with people that we’re cheering for. It’s grown into an ambassadorship program for us. We have over 60 ambassadors.
And they’re all people doing really crazy endurance events. One of them is a kid that is 12 years old that has surfed every day for 1,200 days in a row. Can you imagine the beating your skin takes when you’re in saltwater every single day? Well, he loves Salty Britches. So, we’ll develop those relationships more and more, and we’re gonna do a lot more in the military. That’s a huge project for us that we’re working on. We kind of have let the product tell us where to go next. And our buckets have turned out to be surf shops, boutiques, we just hired a rep group. We’re gonna start selling our hats and shirts because the name Salty Britches is so fun.
Kurt Elster: It’s a good name.
Amy Tucker: People want to wear the gear and have no idea what the product is. So, that has come up over and over and over, so we’re gonna work on that, and we’re gonna sell gear.
Kurt Elster: You got a tiger by the tail.
Amy Tucker: You know, it’s a lot of fun. I mean, we’re growing. We’re gonna be hiring. We’re gonna be bringing some people in house instead of just contracting out. We’ve got a big plan. And the trick for us from day one has been writing that plan down and then backpedaling to figure out how to meet that goal. And that’s just worked for us over, and over, and over, and we’ll continue to do that.
Kurt Elster: That’s such good advice. Amy, if I needed to get some Salty Britches, where would I go?
Amy Tucker: You can find it just about anywhere, but our website, Shopify, we’re still big fans of Shopify, is getsaltybritches dot com. You can find us on Amazon. Salty Britches. You can find us on Walmart dot com. Gosh, just Google it. We’ll pop up. You can find it. We’re not hiding from anybody.
Kurt Elster: I’ll get myself some Salty Britches. I’m going with the black mil-spec is cool. I can’t resist that even if I like the rose. I’ll get some for our next beach vacation. Not a lot of saltwater in the Midwest, it turns out.
Amy Tucker: No, but you have a lot of wind, and a lot of cold, and Salty Britches bonds to the skin, so it prevents wind burn, but it’ll soothe it after the fact too, so dry hands, chapped lips.
Kurt Elster: You’re right. It’s really the winter one that I need. February here is just vicious.
Amy Tucker: Miserable. Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Amy Tucker, Salty Britches, thank you so much.
Amy Tucker: Thank you for having me, Kurt. I appreciate it.