YouSaid · the spoken record

Amanda Klane and Drew Harrington

lines on the record: 46
first: 2023-09-25
most recent: 2023-09-25
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“It was a perfect combination of luck and hard work. We're not naive to know that there were so many balls that bounced our way favorably. There were also a lot of obstacles that came our way that we had to overcome that required hard work, but for it ultimately to end up as a brand that Unilever saw a tremendous amount of value as just a testament to the hard work that went into it by so many people. And as founders of a brand to create something that people put that much energy towards and they cared so deeply for it was just such an unbelievable sense of gratitude that we have for everyone that worked as just as hard as us in different areas and the different phases of the journey.”
2023-09-25 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Yasso: Amanda Klane and Drew Harrington · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Feels great. It feels like the dream we always shared. It makes us super proud of the team that got us this moment. And we're really looking forward to continue on with them as Brandon Ambassadors and see the team continue on as operators of the business as they bring Yasso to more people, which was always our goal.”
2023-09-25 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Yasso: Amanda Klane and Drew Harrington · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It wasn't something we focused necessarily on obsessively. But when we got to a certain point around that break-even year of profitability in 2015, we started to look more seriously in 16 is who could be a longer-term partner. And in 17, we built a great relationship with a private equity firm. And we partnered with them at the end of that quarter.”
2023-09-25 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Yasso: Amanda Klane and Drew Harrington · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, people were promoting in a way that was by a pint, get a pint free. And then you get that pint, you get another pint free. It just was like mathematically, it just couldn't make sense to us. And so we took our shot on innovation. We weren't afraid of that. We believe in the ability for Yaso to move into packaged form. It was just we were launching into a chaotic moment in a category that hadn't had a moment like that in a long time. And we ultimately retreated.”
2023-09-25 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Yasso: Amanda Klane and Drew Harrington · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we were willing to dabble with innovation, but not. Of Greek yogurt. So we went into pints with eight flavors and we got some distribution. And it was in those moments we truly realized the marketing frenzy that was happening by some of these brands that was creating the velocities that were contributing to their revenue growth and becoming the best seller within a short amount of time. And we were in market for a year as you are when you sell something in. And after that, we retreated. Because we just felt it wasn't sustainable.”
2023-09-25 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Yasso: Amanda Klane and Drew Harrington · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and ultimately we came through on all the core things that we knew we needed to do to get to break even in 2015. We got to profitability and it was a real joyous occasion for the company. And ever since then we've been profitable.”
2023-09-25 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Yasso: Amanda Klane and Drew Harrington · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, there was nothing we could do other than put our head down and just continue to improve our product. It was almost a validation of the proposition we had and we were in the market with at that point, maybe for 18 months. And the competitors came fast and quick. It wasn't just Ben and Jerry's. That was a moment that ironically was legitimately in front of our faces in our office every single day for months that we were reminded that other folks with a lot more money and a lot more horsepower are working diligently to bring their equivalent to the market. But it wasn't just them. YoPlay had launched Weight Watchers, Skinny Cow. Like they were all coming.”
2023-09-25 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Yasso: Amanda Klane and Drew Harrington · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was a scary moment. That was at that point we probably had 10 employees. We had an office space in Boston. And every Friday morning, we would host these little breakfasts where everyone had good energy. It was right before the weekend. And one of those Friday breakfastes, we're walking down this long hallway in our office. And the conference room just felt different. Everyone's looking into it. We're all walking together. There was like a tint of blue on everything. And we walk into the conference room and across this small alleyway in Boston above ironically our favorite bar was a billboard that said introducing Ben and Jerry's frozen Greek yogurt. And it was a tough moment to swallow our pride and act, you know, like this isn't a big deal in front of our team, but that was a scary moment for sure.”
2023-09-25 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Yasso: Amanda Klane and Drew Harrington · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Three days at breakfast, and that's making hundreds of thousands of bars. But we ultimately ended up at a small dairy farm in New York. And that was where we started to see our first efficiency on the margin profile. So when we identified this facility, we upgraded and they were actually able to send in tubs. And then as we grew, tubs became tankers. And so we were starting to like get a better margin profile just through scale, but also just improving the fundamentals of everything that was going on in the business.”
2023-09-25 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Yasso: Amanda Klane and Drew Harrington · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it was moving quite well. Like we did quickly outgrow cookie face to some degree and we had to go out and find a new manufacturing facility. In Utah, I remember the bank laughed at because that name was Fat Boy. So we had Mr. Cookie Face and Fat Boy as our two manufacturing facilities. And also just on the raw material side, we really had to scour for Greek yogurt as an ingredient. Like I remember Chobani was growing exponentially and also growing their footprint, which was putting pressure on dairy farmers in upstate New York and elsewhere around the country. And the first bottleneck we really experienced was they were legitimately shipping in 32 ounce containers. And there was a laborer on the line that would spatula out the Greek out of a 32 ounce container, which is what a family probably consumes over.”
2023-09-25 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Yasso: Amanda Klane and Drew Harrington · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, with a gross margin in the teens. We were super bare bones. We weren't paying ourselves much. Sometimes we just didn't pay ourselves at all for the sake of other employees.”
2023-09-25 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Yasso: Amanda Klane and Drew Harrington · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We had a lot of inefficiencies just by nature of our scale. Like we really went out to the big box retailers. And behind the scenes, we were a startup doing the first to do ever Greek frozen Greek yogurt. So there was a lot of complexity, a lot of inefficiencies. We really were, we always joke, we were freshmen playing varsity.”
2023-09-25 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Yasso: Amanda Klane and Drew Harrington · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or two o'clock, we were able to go to the bank and actually cleared and we were able to get the money into the account and wire cookie face.”
2023-09-25 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Yasso: Amanda Klane and Drew Harrington · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, for $100,000 that we owed all of it and some more to the manufacturing facility. And we said, okay, we're going to take this to the bank so we can put it in the account. And then the bank can pay Mr. Cookie face. But on the way to the bank, it was around lunchtime and said, hey, we need to celebrate this. We should stop in and get a burger and a beer and celebrate this moment of the check. And so we go and we sit at the bar. The waitress comes over. She puts down our beers. She accidentally spills my beer all over the check and it is just soaking wet. And she looks down and she says, I'm so sorry. And then she looks a little bit closer and sees the dollar amount. She goes, oh, I am so, so sorry. And I was like, immediately a man and I are freaking out. We're like, we need this. We really, really need this. And she's like, I have an idea. So she took the check and she went back into the kitchen and hung it over an industrial dryer. And it dried out enough that by like one o'clock.”
2023-09-25 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Yasso: Amanda Klane and Drew Harrington · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They were getting nervous, I think, just because they were 23. They had been hit hard before from entrepreneurs that had taken up blind time and tried to launch a product that didn't work. And they probably saw this movie playing out again. Unfortunately, when the check arrived, we were so excited to get it. It was the first receivable we had ever gotten.”
2023-09-25 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Yasso: Amanda Klane and Drew Harrington · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It wasn't the next run. It wasn't fast enough. It was probably 30 day terms at that point, but we knew at least we'd have the cash in a month. But just being young entrepreneurs, we already kind of committing to these manufacturing runs. We were depleting cash pretty rapidly, building up inventory and just kind of wasting a lot of raw materials in the manufacturing facility. They were kind of getting impatient with how long it was taking us to pay, but we were pretty near depleted and we needed this check from Costco to come in. And it finally arrived on a Friday. And Cookieface had been calling for probably two or three Fridays in a row. And I said, I promise you it's coming to us. We're going to pay next week. They were getting nervous.”
2023-09-25 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Yasso: Amanda Klane and Drew Harrington · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was a sizable order. I remember the check was about $100,000, which for us at that moment, because they were first and the terms were so great, it actually came in much quicker than some of our retail customers. And we needed that cash to keep up with the demand.”
2023-09-25 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Yasso: Amanda Klane and Drew Harrington · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We also had Chobani and Faye and those Greek yogurt brands in the dairy set, like truly having a generational moment. yogurt was moving in big box retailers around the country and that was our desire to be first to market with the first frozen forum so a lot of the enthusiasm we had to go big or go home was built because what was happening in the refrigerated set.”
2023-09-25 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Yasso: Amanda Klane and Drew Harrington · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, there was a big restriction. I think we were always kind of looking at skinny cow and Weight Watchers having been the dominant diet brands in the category. And from the early days, we refused to use the word diet because we thought the consumers that perceived like it lacked taste. Ironically, our first flavors did as well. And then as we evolve the flavor profile, something that we believe wholeheartedly now and we didn't know when we launched is that to be an ice cream You have to have some indulgence. You have to have some chocolate chips or cookie dough. And once we unlocked that, we unlocked tremendous flavor. And then our ability to evolve allowed us to lean into the fact that maybe 70 calories is too low. Maybe the benchmark's 100.”
2023-09-25 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Yasso: Amanda Klane and Drew Harrington · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yet, you could say we launched with an imperfect product, but at least we were first to market, and we got into the marketplace in 2011. Even during those retail meetings in that fall of 2010, we knew strawberry was not up to the barrier. It should be in terms of what people expect of strawberry ice cream. So we would tell a few white lies where one of the hard things about frozen food is you're always handling dry ice. And early on, we realized that the TSA would confiscate our dry ice. And when we realized strawberry wasn't as great tasting, we kind of show them blueberry, show them raspberry. They would say, well, I want to try strawberry. It's going to be the best seller. Be like, oh, I was so sorry. TSA confiscated it. But behind the scenes, we were actually trying to make strawberry better for the next production run so we could just launch with something that was better tasting. And I think that started to create a theme of the Yaso DNA. It was just continuous improvement, even to this day.”
2023-09-25 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Yasso: Amanda Klane and Drew Harrington · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Here's the financial arrangement. If you can pay for the runs, we'll do a trial run across all three of your flavors, which was enough for us to then use that product and show retailers in the fall.”
2023-09-25 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Yasso: Amanda Klane and Drew Harrington · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we walked in, we had drove down. I remember the days prior, we were practicing our pitch to each other with like flash cars. This is the brand, this is the market opportunity, so on and so forth. And we walk in, it's the biggest meeting moment of our lives in a way to that point. And we get in the reception area and the receptionist said, oh, I'm so sorry, but we don't have you on the schedule for today. And we said, no, you do. Here's the email. And they said, no, we don't. And the receptionist went out back. We waited for 30 minutes and finally a lady came out, Tammy Shaw, and you could tell she was visibly, you know, upset that we weren't on the schedule, but she's like, I'll listen to what these folks have to say because they drove all this way. And thankfully, we went into a conference room. She heard us out. And I don't know if it's because she felt bad for us or she believed in us, but we pitched her on Yasso and we told her what we thought the opportunity could be. And she said, okay, this sounds good.”
2023-09-25 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Yasso: Amanda Klane and Drew Harrington · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so we had exhausted most of our searches on Google, we came across one in New Jersey, and it was a facility called Mr. Cookie Face in New Jersey. So it literally sounded like a sopranos episode. And we reached out to them asking for a meeting. wrote back that Would be the date and time we could go down to see them to present our business plan.”
2023-09-25 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Yasso: Amanda Klane and Drew Harrington · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The pressure cooker of it all was we wanted to be the first ever frozen Greek yogurt ice cream brand to be able to sell in a grocery to be first to market and start producing revenue in 2011. We needed to meet the sell-in season where retailers, especially in the Northeast, were taking their meetings. And those meetings for the ice cream category happen once a year and they happen September through November or early December. And by early summer, we still didn't have a manufacturing partner. So we knew if we couldn't meet that fall 2010 meeting with retailers and then also scale up manufacturing to meet orders for 2011, we'd most likely miss our shot.”
2023-09-25 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Yasso: Amanda Klane and Drew Harrington · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we had the prototype pool side, that endeavor is actually easier to find a manufacturing partner in China, although it felt half a world away. Here in the United States, once we had our prototype in hand on Yasso, finding a manufacturer partner became extremely difficult.”
2023-09-25 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Yasso: Amanda Klane and Drew Harrington · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we said, hey, can you play around on front of packaging with the name Yasu, spelled Y-A-S-S-O-U? And she actually iterated a concept back to us a week later that just, she had dropped the U. And she said, what do you think about this? It's just Yasso. And she did it in two-tone YAS was in green. So was in brown. And we immediately loved it. We felt that it had energy. And it was easily trademarkable because it was frankly a new word. And that was it.”
2023-09-25 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Yasso: Amanda Klane and Drew Harrington · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was still working at the construction company and a good friend of mine there was of Greek origin and she was walking by me in the hallway one day just very casually said hey if you and your friends are still working on that yogurt company you should think of Yasu. It means hello in Greek. And I went back to my office. Blackberry messengered Amanda and I said, hey, what do you think of Yasu? And she's like, I like it. And we sent.”
2023-09-25 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Yasso: Amanda Klane and Drew Harrington · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was kind of sad. My parents threw us like a barbecue and it made his family came over. My family was there. We invited a bunch of friends and we were like, this is our new venture. Try our products. And it was in the middle of the summer and everyone was tasting it and just like only Boston friends and family could do just very bluntly was like this is not that good. You guys might want to consider doing something else.”
2023-09-25 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Yasso: Amanda Klane and Drew Harrington · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was because Amanda was working for her father and similar to them sleeping on poolside pongs because we had no money. I was pretty much living on Greek yogurt, breakfast, lunch, and dinner because Giovanni was sending free cases of it to Amanda's father's office. So it was kind of an even trade of sorts.”
2023-09-25 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Yasso: Amanda Klane and Drew Harrington · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I remember the call vividly I was in the car with my girlfriend at the time, now my wife, Liz, and Amanda calls and she was on speakerphone and she's like, hey, I have this crazy idea. What do you think about trying to freeze Chobani and make an ice cream product? And I remember I was driving. We were in 95. It was a summer evening coming home from a summer weekend. And before I could even answer, I remember Liz saying, that's cool. And I said, that's cool. Let's do it. And I think maybe only as a naive 22, 23 year old could respond so fast, but that's just the way it was.”
2023-09-25 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Yasso: Amanda Klane and Drew Harrington · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I felt like I couldn't recover. I felt like it just was so much pressure financially carrying that. It's such a young age. So I paid back over time. My partner at the construction company that had put the money into the business and just moved full-time ahead with key learnings, but no financial gains.”
2023-09-25 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Yasso: Amanda Klane and Drew Harrington · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We were on a timeline to meet the order. I believe it was for the holiday season at Spencer's. So what we tried to do is we put them into a large warehouse in Boston, bought blue tape, and tried to cover up every hole, which was obviously labor intensive and costly. And ultimately, when we tried to do that on a prototype version before we sent it out to anyone, it just wasn't working. And that was a tough one. It just felt insurmountable.”
2023-09-25 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Yasso: Amanda Klane and Drew Harrington · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Issue there was we had just taken a huge order from Spencer Gifts and we had built up considerable inventory for that order and the issue was which is important is that all the rafts that had arrived to the states had pinhole holes in them so they weren't staying inflated.”
2023-09-25 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Yasso: Amanda Klane and Drew Harrington · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it was a lot of fun. Honestly, it was like the most fun product you could ever create in contrast to that moment of sadness, of losing a friend. And I think for a lot of people in our friend group, their first exposure to friends starting a company and being entrepreneurial. And it was a good run until we ran into the manufacturing issues.”
2023-09-25 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Yasso: Amanda Klane and Drew Harrington · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We sold them on our website for $49.99 plus shipping. And so the first year, I think we did about. Somewhere around 100,000, 150,000. Wow. And then it got up into year two and three when we added in Spencer's, we eclipsed about a million in revenue.”
2023-09-25 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Yasso: Amanda Klane and Drew Harrington · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it used to be a big box retailer for party supplies. Got it. Then urban outfitters came on board and then our biggest customer was Spencer Giffs.”
2023-09-25 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Yasso: Amanda Klane and Drew Harrington · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. And at that moment, it was direct to consumer via our website. Started to sell quite a bit of units, you know, a couple hundred. And then there was one day where we sold close to 1,000. And what we had learned organically, a blog wrote an article about it that then got picked up by Sports Illustrated. They featured it. And then we started getting orders flowing in from all around the country. And with that momentum, a buyer from... I party had reached out.”
2023-09-25 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Yasso: Amanda Klane and Drew Harrington · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that was a hard thing because it was 2007. A lot of the stores we approached were very uncomfortable with the idea of the liability of selling a raft that was in a pool with the purpose of drinking beer out of. We were kind of ahead of our time in terms of the idea. I think in the product, the product would have been perfect in an Instagram world. We weren't living in that world yet. Everything we were doing was through Facebook and even Amazon wasn't what it's like now in terms of B2C.”
2023-09-25 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Yasso: Amanda Klane and Drew Harrington · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He believed in it. His financial partners believed in it, and it was a good first learning. 50,000 really took care of that first big production. And up until that point with just some reserve cash was engineer, prototypes, product design, website, things like that.”
2023-09-25 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Yasso: Amanda Klane and Drew Harrington · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The first few orders were lenient. I think at first we ordered 5,000 units, which was a scary thing because now I had a garage bay or two filled with inflatable beer pong tables that we had to sell.”
2023-09-25 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Yasso: Amanda Klane and Drew Harrington · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So they did not exist. We were the first ones to create it. And we worked with an engineer in Texas that figured out the way to essentially create an inflatable table that had the holes for the cups in it because it was really no different than an air mattress. But obviously we needed the cups to sit in. So we had an engineer develop it in Texas. And in those days, we used a combination of Google and Alibaba to identify a manufacturer in Shanghai, China that could produce it for us. And ultimately, we sent our plans. They produced it, sent us prototypes from their large-scale manufacturing facility, and it worked.”
2023-09-25 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Yasso: Amanda Klane and Drew Harrington · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So now you put, you can imagine that next call to my parents. So I dropped out. I'm working at a construction company and I'm going to do inflatable beer pong tables.”
2023-09-25 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Yasso: Amanda Klane and Drew Harrington · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I did it on the side, so I continued to work full time, and Scott and I would effectively kind of brainstorm ideas of what these products could be. And then we started to ideate around this idea around inflatable beer pong table, which was fitting for two-year-old guys. Sorry.”
2023-09-25 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Yasso: Amanda Klane and Drew Harrington · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we weren't filled with anger. I think we were filled with a lot of sadness, of course, but also this desire to create something with people and the belief that this could get better even in that darkest moment. And it was really through that conversation over a few summer days that we thought, well, let's create a company. Let's create products. dive into our creativity and ideally heal through that and kind of get some friends involved and go off and hopefully bring some products to market almost like is a distraction from everything that was really happening in our lives which was the loss of our friend and I think at that moment because I had worked for so long I maybe you know in hindsight had the courage to take that leap knowing I now know what the workforce is like I wouldn't mind taking the risk to see if it's something I can do on my own”
2023-09-25 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Yasso: Amanda Klane and Drew Harrington · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I was still working for Jadorenzo, the construction company probably 50 to 55 hours a week. And a few life events, one being one of Amanda and I's best friends, passed away going into her senior year. And I just remember in that moment I was with another friend of ours, my friend Scott.”
2023-09-25 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Yasso: Amanda Klane and Drew Harrington · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, at that point, we probably had 10 employees. We had an office space in Boston. And we walk into the conference room and across this small alleyway was a billboard that said introducing Ben and Jerry's frozen Greek yogurt. And it was a tough moment to swallow our pride and act like this isn't a big deal in front of our team. That was a scary moment for sure.”
2023-09-25 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Yasso: Amanda Klane and Drew Harrington · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT