YouSaid · the spoken record

Seth Berkowitz

lines on the record: 115
first: 2024-08-26
most recent: 2024-08-26
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I mean, it's a persistent story for sure. I mean, we should have been bankrupt a dozen times easy. I think it's grind is how we got here to some extent, but like, yeah, things had to fall the way that they fell. The iPhone, if the iPhone didn't happen, obviously the world's very different, but Insomnia, I don't know. I'm not sure we make it without the app culture we have today. So I'll say I'm a 50-50. How about that?”
2024-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Insomnia Cookies: Seth Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think there was a period of time where I was much more experimental. Like I had a laundry business at one point and I've invested in different growth organizations. Probably founded six or seven things. As I've gotten older, and since really the Krispy Kreme transaction, I've gotten a lot clearer of what I want to do and focus on that, focus on it intensely, really put all my energy into one thing. And over time, I've slowly gotten rid of some things that I've had. I've sold things off and closed things down. And I'm really just down to insomnia cookies at this point. And that's been really intentional. Like, I have been entrepreneurial, but I have morphed to some extent from founder, operator, entrepreneur into a CEO.”
2024-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Insomnia Cookies: Seth Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Insomnia is like a child. To me, honestly, it really is. I would never think to give away a kid. I can't even imagine a world without insomnia. I'm ready to go for the next 50 years. I really am. It's just a function of the business. Can we turn it into something that can be that big?”
2024-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Insomnia Cookies: Seth Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Said those exact words many, many times, many times. Are you still doing this cookie thing? Yes, they said that many times.”
2024-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Insomnia Cookies: Seth Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, it's hard to try to control everything, right? I don't know how this will land. I do know as we speak to parties, there's typically real interest in our management team continuing to drive it. So that's always a good thing to hear. But this has been a windy journey in 2021 years. Really windy. Up and down, left and right, you know, anything I can imagine has happened to some extent. And so I try not to fret these things. Like I feel like if we build a business, we grow the community. We deliver warm cookies, it'll all work out at the end.”
2024-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Insomnia Cookies: Seth Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're opening pretty rapidly. We opened up our 287th store last week, and we have five international stores, a couple more coming. I mean, the Insomnia story is still early innings.”
2024-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Insomnia Cookies: Seth Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like at the end of the day, it's almost like a negotiation that's playing through emotions, and you relive history. And this is just unfortunately the way it had to go out”
2024-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Insomnia Cookies: Seth Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A many year litigation. I mean, it started right around the Krispie Cream announcement and it settled in January of this year. It was almost a six-year litigation, which is pretty wild and only, I think, only happened because of COVID getting in the way. But yeah, we were pretty far apart for a long time. No one has really a reason to settle until you have a reason to settle. And I think we hit the deliberation box with the jury having the decision in their hands. And we both were like, all right, we got to figure this out because this could go either way. But we did settle. And a part of it that was really poetic was like Jared and I, the relationship ended in such a difficult way. And the friendship really fizzled. And after we settled, we like, we hugged, which sounds like silly, but like it was almost like a closure of a friendship for 20 years.”
2024-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Insomnia Cookies: Seth Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, just one small technical piece there. It's very complex legal, but like basically we were debating over what I owned at the time, what he owned at the time, what I own now, it's just all these different pieces and elements to it. At the end of the day, we went through”
2024-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Insomnia Cookies: Seth Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we spoke at one point in 2009. We hadn't spoken in nearly a decade. That was really the last time I chatted with him. We talk some baseball”
2024-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Insomnia Cookies: Seth Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it was a big change. It was honestly, it was like, all right, well, sometimes you spend 15 years of your life hoping something will happen and putting everything you have into it. And magic happens. But yeah, it was a big, big shift.”
2024-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Insomnia Cookies: Seth Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All of them gone. And our sales decline almost 50% like this. But what we did understand was that our consumers still loved us. They just weren't accessible. So how do we reach them? And so we started expanding our delivery zones, still trying to be true to our delivery times and making sure that warmth was there, but we extended out to five miles from three miles, and all of a sudden we were back to normal and growing and growing and adding stores. And since then, it's been the fastest growth we've ever had.”
2024-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Insomnia Cookies: Seth Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we had a really initially a huge challenge. So College campus centric business. In March of 2020. One day we had college students, the next day we did not.”
2024-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Insomnia Cookies: Seth Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It became much more centered on the data and say, okay, this is working. Let me do a lot more of this. Now, the one part with Krispy Kreme, though, is that we joined them in late 18. By the time we really got to know each other, COVID hit. And then everything, all bets were off”
2024-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Insomnia Cookies: Seth Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think the part that was so helpful is that one, they helped us think about the brand, why we were successful, and how to tell that story. So delivering the warm cookies, being value-oriented, but also driving a business. This is going to sound kind of silly, but like over the years, I was so desperately trying to get to a sustainable place by growing that I sometimes lost sight of what the business itself needed to look like to be successful. So they kind of helped me thread discipline through it, like financial discipline back into Insomnia, making sure that the decisions we made were helping the business and the organization grow in tandem. That's where I kind of got lost. And as I told you the story today going through the 15 years that preceded this, a lot of the decisions I made weren't about discipline. They were about hope. They're about I hope this works out. I hope this truck works. I hope that this tasty-like concept works.”
2024-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Insomnia Cookies: Seth Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At the end of the process, they were standing there with us, shoulder to shoulder, and they were clear with me from day one. Like, Seth, we're only doing this if you're still here. Like, you know the story, you know the experience. And they really helped me kind of rethink the whole thing.”
2024-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Insomnia Cookies: Seth Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's all our managers. And all our support center teams. So it's three or four hundred people event. It's truly the highlight of my year. But I remember going through the details of how to get delivery times down from 40 minutes to 30 minutes, how to do it step by step. And it was such hard work. Like the system had gotten so big that the type of work we were trying to do was it just, I felt like I was a roll your sleeves up, operator, entrepreneur who needed to morph into CEO, who could understand how to really rely on others and trust others to build the brand with me. And I just wasn't in that place. I recognize I wasn't in that place. I'm like, I need help or I need to exit. Those are really the two options. And we started a process trying to find buyers. We hired an investment bank and we spoke to dozens and dozens of people. I met Krispy Krem in February of 2018. Then I met 60-ish people.”
2024-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Insomnia Cookies: Seth Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I didn't realize that's what I wanted, but it's what we needed. The way Krispy Kreme came about was, I think it was late 2017. Something happened internally. I don't remember exactly what it was where I just felt like we had had this huge growth story, 20 stores, 150 locations so rapidly, and we didn't hit a wall, but I could see something was breaking. Like it was, the demand wasn't exactly there in the same way. Our innovation wasn't moving at the pace that we needed it to, our delivery times were slipping. Like we were going back to our organization. We have an annual summit, which actually we're going to have next week in Philly. And we had a couple hundred people. And I remember kind of walking through.”
2024-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Insomnia Cookies: Seth Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For us, it's me. I mention that craving. Like, we want to meet the craving. We want the product to always be delicious and for you to rely on that, for you to eat it and want it again and not eat it and then something else next week change that maybe you want to take a picture of. Like I don't want to be disparaging to them because what they've done is extraordinary. There's not very few examples of this. They had a really big growth story at one point. It's hard to sustain that pace. It's hard to sustain consistency and standards and quality at that pace. And it's just really hard to do it in a franchise system. As you said, the story is yet to be told.”
2024-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Insomnia Cookies: Seth Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Honestly didn't. I look at what they do. I look at their entry point. I look at the type of product. And I look at a cup, I see a cupcake. I don't really even see a cookie. So I see it. It's real. It's not nothing. But it's a different, really a very different business. And it's not something that we struggle with.”
2024-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Insomnia Cookies: Seth Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I keep a very close watch on the indulgence space in general. I watch the cupcakes guys all through, you know, the early 2000s. I watch kind of ice cream scoop shops, 2015 to 2020, Jenny's and Salt and Straw. So, I'm always watching the indulgence space because a craving is a craving, right? You're trying to meet a craving. If somebody's somebody gets in the way of the craving that you were filling, that's difficult. So we keep a watchful eye on it But Willa Closer will look at when are they successful? What times of day? What sort of products can they deliver it? Can they do it quickly? Like we'll really digest it as it relates to really our benchmarks as a brand. And then we'll start to understand what's competitive and what isn't and make sure that we're telling the right value story.”
2024-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Insomnia Cookies: Seth Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not really. I mean, I always thought of like dominoes as the competitor or. Even some of those kind of local mom and pop shops that were delivering. That was really a share of stomach at one o'clock in the morning. That's what we were going after. Even with other businesses growing in the last couple years who are focused on some form of a cookie, whether it's larger or has tons of toppings, like for us, that late night insomniac is so true to who we are and that's what we compete for.”
2024-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Insomnia Cookies: Seth Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I have some healthy paranoia. I never trust that insomnia is safe. I mean, honestly, I'll look at sales in a given day, in a given hour. And if I see it going in the wrong direction, I start to get, I course correct. I'm constantly course correcting. I think it's being forged out of crisis, right? Like becoming an entrepreneur in a business that took 20 years to get here and all the struggles of financial crisis and all the pivots and model, yeah, it'll be very difficult for me to ever get to a place of comfort and complacency. It's just not who I am.”
2024-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Insomnia Cookies: Seth Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, at that point, we were profitable and past the like, there was money after all the building we were doing. It was that kind of self-sustaining dream by 2013 had been achieved.”
2024-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Insomnia Cookies: Seth Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was certainly a good financial decision. I think there's elements of it still today where we can just drive a better experience at the door. I order food multiple times a week. Our drivers care about the Insomnia Cookie order. Whereas the DoorDash drivers are agnostic to what they're delivering. And so there's a little bit of an ability to...”
2024-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Insomnia Cookies: Seth Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was very resistant to working with third parties. I believe that the brand moments that we can elevate in the store and when we deliver to customers was so core to who we were, I didn't want to lend that out to DoorDash and a third party delivery system. And so I didn't really open up to the DoorDash and Ubers of the world in earnest until the middle of COVID when we had to rethink the entire business model.”
2024-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Insomnia Cookies: Seth Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At this point, they started to reach parody. Retail and delivery right around that point. Reach about 50%. And it's kind of been like that for 10 years now.”
2024-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Insomnia Cookies: Seth Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, Saturday night after the bars closed, we were the go-to. And I say this sometimes like people make bad decisions late at night, like 12 cookies. We want to be your go-to move there at 2.30 in the morning, right? That's where Insomnia is most successful.”
2024-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Insomnia Cookies: Seth Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, we were really, really disciplined about real estate. There was one principle, which was late night. It had to be a late night area. No matter what, so a bar, club area.”
2024-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Insomnia Cookies: Seth Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't think I even realized at the time. Like, you have to look back and be like, oh, it was store 22. But that was the point where we weren't living check to check as it related to investors. We were on our own. We were all set. And we then opened 120 stores exactly like that, directly from the profit of the business. It was...”
2024-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Insomnia Cookies: Seth Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was by, I think, 2011, the world is getting better, the financial world was certainly improving. Our business was improving, and we were getting closer and closer to break even. And I sat down with a new potential investor who I remember he turned to this good friend of mine who'd given me office space and I'd sat with a couple years. He's like, you got to cut another check into these guys. Like, they're there. They're right there. And that conversation, by the way, was huge. There's been moments where I'm like, thank goodness these happened. That's one of those moments where this person I had really never met before convinced one of my most trusted investors to cut one last check. And that was the last check we ever was ever cut back into the business, you know, for really seed money ever again.”
2024-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Insomnia Cookies: Seth Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, that's the moment, right? I mean, that's where the business tips from fledgling to there's clear path forward. The iPhone was an absolute game changer. It turned us from a late night on-demand business in a universe where that did not exist to being right in the middle of what everybody wanted.”
2024-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Insomnia Cookies: Seth Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think when I zoomed out, especially at this point, so you're 2010, when you peeled back and you looked at the core model that exists today, brick and mortar business, on a college campus, in a late night environment where we deliver, there was real success there. In the Great Recession, the stores were working. And it wasn't what other people were experiencing, which were franchising with declining volume. We didn't have declining volume or margins that were very hard to come by. Like we always had a reasonable margin. So I could see it on paper. I just needed to believe it and then bring it to life.”
2024-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Insomnia Cookies: Seth Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So you ask the question like Did I ever reach that point of just utter despair? I really didn't. There was always something that was keeping me optimistic.”
2024-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Insomnia Cookies: Seth Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I had my first child March of 2010, so right in the middle of it, and I kind of had this feeling at that point, like Seth, you got to figure it out. You're seven years into this, you have a kid. Like, what is it really going to take to figure it out? And one thing that helped us there was I opened up a location on the upper west side of Manhattan two blocks from where I lived at the time. It was the first kind of like city-only location. We had NYU, but we never had like a city only, like a neighborhood store. And that store, I ended up building it myself. I didn't really have a ton of capital. So like I cleaned the store, I put down the flooring. I had hired a plumber to run the sink and an electrician to put in the oven, but like I built the millwork and like really put the pieces together, painted the location. And it was a absolute home run from day one.”
2024-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Insomnia Cookies: Seth Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I did. I really, this was the point where, first of all, I didn't know what to do. I have no other, I don't have any other experience, right? I've been a cookie entrepreneur for 21 years. It's all I knew. And so the idea of what was my next career path and it's the middle of the recession, like it felt like the only option was to move forward, but I had very little confidence. And, you know, I had continuous conversations with my wife, I don't know what to do. This isn't working. Once she said, like, maybe she should throw in the towel. And I was like, no, no, no. I'm not doing that. And then there was another time where I was driving Cookie Dough somewhere in the middle of the night and I called her. I was really frustrated. And I was like, oh my goodness, like, I'm pedaling cookies through the Midwest at 2 o'clock in the morning. Like, how did I get here? But she said to me, like, you've believed, you know, you believe in this. You do. You've been doing it for 10 years. I believe in you. Do what you got to do. Like, go make it happen.”
2024-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Insomnia Cookies: Seth Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's what we've experienced at times. I mean, it's also like it's a nice pick-me-up. People just like a little sweet moment, especially in a depressing kind of environment, right? It's just, it's one of those small indulgences”
2024-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Insomnia Cookies: Seth Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was definitely two years. I'm thinking whether it made its way into three between two and three years. It was like I was driving a temple's campus and I was the only guy who knew how to fix the generator. I'd say, hey, do we open to? And the store was doing pretty well. The truck was important. And I'd say, did the generator work this morning? No. Like, all right, I'll see you in two hours. And I'd get in my car and I'd drive to temple and I'd fix the generator and I'd head on home. Like there were moments like that for years.”
2024-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Insomnia Cookies: Seth Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I drove around the country. I did it for three years. Fixing generators. Delivering product. I used to, I remember used to deliver cookie dough from New York to Syracuse. I'd meet the Syracuse team on the bridge on the way into Syracuse. So it would save me 30 minutes so I could turn around and drive home. So instead of being an eight-hour round trip, I do it in seven. It was crazy. I did compartmentalize that time. I don't really think about it too much. It was so very hard.”
2024-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Insomnia Cookies: Seth Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Once it really became clear whether Lehman Brothers had blown up, there was no more capital. And I went to the investors, as I'd been doing for the last three or four years. I'm like, here's what our loss is for the year. It's less than last year, but it's still a loss. You know, I'm hoping to erase half a million dollars. And they're like, checkbook's closed. We have no idea what the future holds. The checkbook is closed. Like, figure out what you're going to do. And so I ended up cutting my team down to myself and a finance associate and we had kind of a field operator who drove around. And I stopped paying myself for 18 months. I moved my office from a corporate office to one of my investors, like really kind of his closet, like the back of his office had this little 50 square foot space. We put two desks in there”
2024-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Insomnia Cookies: Seth Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so built a couple trucks. They looked great. It was going to be like that's the future of Insomnia. By the time the 10 were on the road and not working that well, raising capital became nearly impossible. And like, I mean, it was a really scary time.”
2024-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Insomnia Cookies: Seth Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The college environment kind of in the long term. I do get that. And no one knew how to fix them. The oven would break and the propane system would break and the truck would break down. The maintenance levels on that were so, so high that over time, like we just weren't open as much as we really wanted to be. And so I talked about recency bias before. Like, I think I got a little bit too focused on, oh, maybe this is it. And then I went really fast. And vending trucks ended up being a right turn I wish I hadn't taken. It was like a two year real distraction. And we veered into the Great Recession in 09.”
2024-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Insomnia Cookies: Seth Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And while those eight more were being built, in the case of Madison, Wisconsin, the city changed its ordinance where our truck was no longer the right size. It was too big, and we had to move it off campus. I think I took it a little personally, but it felt like they reduced the ordinance to like one foot smaller than my truck was. And there were other trucks that operated on campus, but the truck, the vending truck environment just didn't work for small cities. And you know what? I get it, right? Like they're loud. They're open all hours a night. It's not like it's self-enclosed, right? People are lining up on the streets. It doesn't lend so well.”
2024-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Insomnia Cookies: Seth Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We were able to bake on premise and get the dough worked out on premise. We really had a full insomnia kitchen in a vending truck. Very little rent, right? Almost no rent. And so I was trying to continue to skinny down the model. And it was super, super successful. So much so that we opened up another one in Madison, Wisconsin. And that one was really successful. And after these two trucks, I committed to eight more.”
2024-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Insomnia Cookies: Seth Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“By the way, I still didn't have clarity, 100% clarity on the model, because I tried a vending truck. In Ann Arbor in late 07.”
2024-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Insomnia Cookies: Seth Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'd seen some franchisees really flop. There's a lot of recency bias in some of the things I'm saying. I saw Mrs. Fields. It didn't do well. At this time, I watched Quiznose grow so fast and then be done like that, right? And so there were things I was seeing around me that were giving me some anxiety. But I think it also goes back to who I am. You know, I really like the details. I really like innovating all the time. I like changing things up. I like mixing them up. And that's not really where franchising is built. Franchising is stronger marketing. It's really strong standardization, making sure that you can educate and train really, really effectively. And I was still kind of in that roll my sleeves up and get in there and figure out what the brand was going to be. I'm not sure I even understood what I was going to be franchising yet.”
2024-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Insomnia Cookies: Seth Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah, I mean, I was always a believer in corporate own just to make sure that something that was a little bit novel as it related to the restaurant environment, like basically delivery as a core competency outside of dominoes and the pizza guys was pretty rare. So I wanted to make sure that a franchisee didn't turn it into retail only, that I saw fail in the forms of Mrs. Fields and Great American Cookie. And so I made this concerted effort to keep it company owned and still is to today. But then I had to hire a management team. So in late 2006, early 2007, I hired an operations lead. I hired a director of marketing. We had a creative manager. And then we had some finance support. So it was kind of the first time I built a team. There's five of us.”
2024-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Insomnia Cookies: Seth Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I found a fresh, I mean it's fresh capital, but I found, you know, I met a new group of investors in later half of 2006, Penalum, through their kids, by the way, who'd been customers, which is pretty gratifying. And they sat down with me and they said, you know, what's it going to take for you to turn this into something more meaningful? It's like honestly a real slug of capital. I've been raising tens of thousands of dollars in pieces over the course of the last three or four years and have never had like a real considerable amount of money to hire a team to find more locations to get that critical mass of stores that would lead to that sustainability I was looking for. And that was really the first more meaningful capital raise I did in the latter half of 2006.”
2024-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Insomnia Cookies: Seth Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We started to like tweak the equipment package very early on, make sure that the oven was right, that we can keep the cookie warm for the long term, that when we delivered it, we can do it quickly, that the technology that underpinned the business was strong. I make the supply chain really clear from day one, which like I wanted the cookies to taste the same everywhere that we went. And so we figured out ways to standardize the product that shows up in each of the stores. Those tweaks over time, one brought the cost down and two made the product even stronger.”
2024-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Insomnia Cookies: Seth Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But if there's some brand love that's kind of hard to find. And so we're building it over time. And as you start to take away some of the distracting elements, take away the yogurt, focus on the core business, focus on the core insomniac who is that college student, and just get better at delivery, make sure the product tasted better each and every day. There was some clarity that that can grow into something bigger. And I started to just believe it. And honestly, if you said Seth, maybe you were just delusional. I'd have a hard time arguing with you.”
2024-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Insomnia Cookies: Seth Berkowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT