Branchfood was thrilled to have Jenn Mason, Founder of Curds&Co. and Curdbox, at our latest Ask an Entrepreneur session this week! Jenn has been a regular at our monthly Community Table for over four years, and we’re so glad she could join us to share more about her journey growing an artisanal cheese shop, launching a cheese subscription box, and starting a novel eatery in the middle of a pandemic. 

Watch the session below to hear Jenn share her best practices on starting a subscription business, navigating cold chain distribution, using storytelling to amplify your brand’s voice, launching a Kickstarter campaign, and more.

Don’t forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel to be the first to know when more content like this is available, and if you'd like to try Curdbox, use promo code "ASKJENN" for $10 off 3 or more month subscription for the rest of December!

Can’t sit down to watch the whole thing? Don’t worry! Read on for a recap of Jenn’s advice from this session. 

What was the process of deciding to start your first investor-back business like?

I actually haven’t had an investor yet! We’ve been very lucky to be able to self-finance so far. We’ve discussed whether bringing on investors would help us move faster, but everybody has told us that we seem to be moving fast enough, and we shouldn’t give away that control until we have to. We were going slow enough initially that we had time to figure things out, and I didn’t have to make big costly mistakes. I’m ready to go fast now in case anybody’s asking! 

As for the process of deciding to start the business, I had a birthday party with cheese tasting and a light bulb went off. I started doing so much research. I have ADD, so I need to have something that doesn’t bore me in three minutes — and you can’t learn enough about cheese. You can’t try enough cheese, you can’t visit enough cheese makers, it’s never boring. And everybody loves you! When you tell someone you own a cheese business, everyone smiles — it’s the nicest thing. 

Within the industry, I knew I didn’t want to compete with the older traditional models, like Formaggio Kitchen. They’re a staple here in Boston, but I wanted to do something that made people who weren’t going to cheese stores go and try something new. Curdbox is a way to scale to the entire country. My family is from Michigan, where they put cheese in every single meal because it’s so close to Wisconsin, but it’s not necessarily good cheese. When I told my mom I was opening a cheese store she asked me if I had trouble finding the cheese aisle at the grocery store! But now she gets it. 

When you first started, how did you promote and find customers (both B2B and B2C). 

We don’t do a lot of B2B yet — we were just getting started with it pre-COVID, and it’s still the next thing on our list. Right now we work with Urban Grape doing most of their catering. They’ve been fantastic! They’re just not doing much right now because of the pandemic, but we’ve been working with them on some things virtually. We’ve been looking to find more partners like that, as well as working with restaurants and having a cheese board program when things get back to normal. 

With B2C, the biggest thing is knowing what a landing page is. If you don’t know, look it up! If you know what it is, but can’t think of a way to use it in your business, spend some time thinking about what you can do. The biggest thing is that you can’t talk to customers unless you have access to them, and the best way to get access to them in most cases is to get their emails. Landing pages have been great tools for us. Before we opened the store, before we started Curdbox — we had a landing page for every step. Whenever I was talking to other people, or I could always send them somewhere and collect their information. Collecting those emails was very valuable for me. As far as grassroots work, I just bought a big ream of white paper for the windows of our store as we were building it out. We’d change the messages on the paper once a week — we’d make cheese jokes, tell people what cheeses we were going to carry, cut holes out so people could look inside. We tried to really engage people so that as we got close to opening, it was like a brick and mortar landing page for people to pass by and see information. 

It’s also so important to talk to customers like they’re special. This is something I learned in publishing: people want to know that they have inside access. Honestly, a customer who’s willing to consider spending time and money on your business is probably already an insider to you, and they do have a special place in your heart. We’d send out a lot of special announcements to our customers ahead of time, before we announced them to the public, and that would drive a lot of excitement. Telling people that they’re the first to know something has been a really great thing, and quite frankly, I want our regulars to get the deals first and reward them for their loyalty. 

Any tips on carrying out a successful subscription campaign? What about subscription retail for restaurant businesses?

For restaurant businesses, it depends on what kind of subscription retail you’re thinking about. If it’s anything like Hello Fresh or Blue Apron, and this isn’t just something you want to do for your local community, my advice is that you can probably find a better use of your time and stress. I see a lot of people try to open similar businesses, but even the people with the most money and resources are still struggling to figure them out at a giant scale. 

If you’re a local restaurant just trying to figure out how to get dinner for two into the mouths of 50-100 people, that’s totally different. You’re not trying to scale up hugely, so you can figure out economies of scale there — you probably already used to cook for that many people. Logistics is the biggest thing, and you can think about how to be creative and smart with this. Do you have a refrigerator in the back that you’re not using? Roll it into the front vestibule so that people can easily come pick up food. Irene Li from Mei Mei has been doing really interesting things. 

For subscription campaigns in general, the trick is churn. Churn is the pace at which people leave your company, the lifetime value of your customer. You want to make the churn as small as possible, and make your customer’s lifetime as long as possible. The first thing to do is think about what kind of subscription business this is, and don’t try to be everything at once. There’s replenishment, like razor subscriptions. There’s value boxes, like FabFitFun — you get $200 worth of stuff for $49.99, and every influencer out there has promoted it. A box like that is really difficult. You can do a box based on free content, like Birchbox, which gets free product samples from companies to include. That can be difficult, especially when you’re small, because nobody’s going to give you anything for free if you don’t have a reputation. Unless you had plans to do something as big as Birchbox, I wouldn’t try to scale that up. Then there’s experiential boxes, which is where Curdbox falls. We give three cheese and three pairings that revolve around a theme, and we create a Spotify playlist, a pairing card, and a podcast. We try to make it really accessible and fun: my best friend and I eat through the box, talk about the cheese, and she plays the part of the regular customer asking me the cheese questions.

After you decide what kind of box you’ll be, you need to figure out how to keep people from unsubscribing. For example, I saw someone who wanted to do a candle subscription — but how many candles can you go through in a month? Our box is all something you can eat in one sitting. We also don’t let people know what’s going to be in the box ahead of time, so you won’t unsubscribe if you just don’t happen to like one of the items. Instead, we think really carefully about what we’re putting in — if we’re including blue cheese, we’ve considered that not everyone likes it, and we try to pair it with something really cool, like a caramel, so that they’ll end up loving it. Price is also important in keeping people subscribed; even if your box really is worth a certain amount of money, you may need to offer it at less than that. 

A question about cold chain: My business, Freed Foodies, has mainly just sold our mixes and pizza crust kits, but I really want to start offering some finished baked goods and doughs through e-commerce. I have some brownies and biscuit doughs that we’ve already vetted, but I’m still trying to figure out a cost-effective cold shipping solution to use at small scale. I don’t want to invest in hundreds of packs of all these materials if I don’t have the whole concept yet, but I still want to test the concept out. I’m struggling to find a good option that’s realistic at scale for shipping our products at freezer-temperature, so that if we’re mailing baked goods, they’ll still last for a week when it gets to the customer. 

You don’t want to price yourselves out of the market before you even start because you’re too expensive. Let's say the box you need would be 50¢ if you got a thousand of them, but they’re $2 if you only need thirty of them. I’d price them with the 50¢ cost in mind — that’s an investment in testing the right price. Then you know that every time you add another 100 boxes onto your order, you're going to make a little more money. If you’re committed to scaling up and getting to that point, that’s better than charging more initially and slowly cutting your price back. We’re also talking about smaller costs here — fifty cents, a dollar — we’re not talking $100! You definitely don’t want to eat costs that high.  

I’ve also seen a lot of vendors with great products, but they don’t know what a store owner like myself needs to charge. They’ll show me a product at $5, and tell me I can sell it at $6.50 — but they don’t understand how our margins work. We’d need to sell it at $10, but if nobody will buy that product for $10, then I can’t buy it. 

As far as shipping, I’d highly recommend reaching out to Eric Ballhausen. He was one of the first employees at Butcher Box, and we worked with him for a few months last year — he got us so far, so quickly. This man knows logistics! He brought in someone from FedEx and someone from UPS, and since Eric was there and he has proven his ability to scale with Butcher Box, they took us seriously. It was great to talk to them in person, rather than trying to email someone random online, and we got a great price that wasn’t available elsewhere. You’ll need to tell them what you’re doing and where you think you can get to, and then ask for any deals they can give. Then you can sign that piece of paper and get that deal for as long as you need it. It’s complicated, but it’s doable! Just make sure you’re having those conversations, not just using the website. 

One tip for anybody doing shipping: we got a computer and label printer from UPS, just because we were customers of theirs! And that was back when we were doing 35-75 boxes a month. Make sure you’re asking about that equipment before you go out and buy it. 

*A recommendation from Daniel Brasslof, Branchfood member and Founder of Freed Foodies: check out Pirate for low-cost shipping and labels! 

What were the biggest legal hurdles you went through when you first started Curds&co.?

Being afraid to call a lawyer! But that’s no longer an issue thanks to my incredible lawyer Gerry Coakley, from Lang Coakley. If you’re looking for legal advice, I’d highly recommend reaching out to him — now calling my lawyer is the best part of my day!

It’s also really important to feel confident about your contracts, whether it’s for hiring or rental spaces. As a new business, you will have to contract with people, and you need to have the knowledge to protect yourself from things like pandemics, for example! A good lawyer will help set you up for this, and help you understand what you are and aren’t capable of doing yourself. 

What was your Kickstarter campaign like? What stage were you at when you launched, and where did you end up?

There’s a lot of reasons to do a Kickstarter, and our reason wasn’t actually so much about raising money — we needed people to subscribe. We really used it as a marketing tool to get people excited about Curdbox and get the names of people who would be interested in the concept. Before the Kickstarter, we were under 50 subscribers. In order to send the boxes to a fulfillment center that could pack the boxes for us, we needed to get that number over 120 — and we did! The Kickstarter allowed people to take notice of us, and prove that people wanted to be part of this. 

Some more tips: think about how much money you need, and then try to raise more than that. Start selling things before you even get on Kickstarter — if you get a few people to come in right away and buy some of the big ticket items, then you look even more appealing and less risky to everyone else. Communicate a lot as you go along, otherwise you’ll end up with bad PR and angry customers. Be creative with your rewards, and try to keep them free whenever possible — it doesn’t have to be a bag with your logo printed on it! For example, making a really cool digital guide on a topic you know a lot about. It’s also exciting to create a really big-ticket reward, even though, most likely, nobody will take you up on it — offer to fly cross country, name a product after them, and have a barbecue! Even if nobody buys it, it’s important to have something beyond where you’re hoping people will land. And, if someone does want to spend that much money, they’re getting a really cool experience, not just dozens of t-shirts. Make sure you market it a lot. This brings back that idea of insiders — tell certain people ahead of time that they’re getting the insider info and drive excitement, so that when the Kickstarter launches, you already have people immediately signing up. 

How did you arrive at Curdbox’s initial price point?

Initially it was $34.95, now it’s $49.95. We had to raise our pricing at one point because we wanted to add more to the box. Artisanal cheese is expensive, and we realized that we were going to run out of cheeses really quickly that we could actually afford to put in the box. We do pay for all the products — we’re not getting these for free — but we do ask for a small discount from the wholesale. We use that to help offset the creation of our podcast, the maker video, and all of the social media. It’s been a good deal for the vendors, too. When we were just starting out, they were getting all these photos and mentions. Now that we’re bigger, more and more people want to be in the box because they’re getting in 750 homes across the country, people who really like food and who are really excited to be receiving the products. They can target their exact customer!

We definitely have a budget for every component of the box, and we try to balance that with every component we’re putting in. We also calculate the cost of the box, the ice, the storage, the shipping, and then price the margin in the same way we would for our store, which is about 50%. 

One cool thing with Curdbox is that we do smaller sizes for all the jams and pairings — customers can’t walk into a store and get the same products for less than $80 or $90, because they’d have to buy full sizes of all those things. We also source from all over, so you really can’t get all three cheeses at one store, no matter where you shop. Some people don’t realize that, and if we lowered the cost, we wouldn’t be able to include high quality cheeses. $49.95 isn’t cheap, but it’s because we’re not including cheap products! But we are the least expensive cheese and pairing subscription box, and it’s mostly because we figured out logistics — we worked really hard on that. 

What are some tips to use storytelling to amplify your sales and marketing strategy?

This is a really valuable thing for anyone to do at any level. Look around for examples of great storytelling in your field, and think about how you can tell a similar story in your brand voice. Really understanding your brand voice is key — the Curdbox and Curds&co. voice is appropriately snarky. Nothing offensive, but we’re definitely a little sassy, and we play on cheese puns. We also talk about cheese being a great reward after a long day. It’s this tiny little story, but when you put it together with a consistent message across your branding, you start to hear the whole thing.

The thing I’m most proud getting through COVID has been a newsletter we sent out back in March. Back then, every business was sending out their COVID email, and if one more bank sent me information on how to wash my hands, I was going to scream. I didn’t want to send something like that out, because nobody needed to hear it. I thought long and hard about what our response would be, and I ended up writing a Dr. Seuss style poem about what we were doing. We don’t usually get many replies to our newsletter, but that email got 15 responses from people saying it made their day, or it made them laugh. It was single-handedly the best email we ever sent, and it’s because we were true to our voice. 

What are your best practices on influencer marketing in an online world?

Influencer marketing was actually better for us when we weren’t investing in it! We’ve been surprised by how much our PR has taken off, while influencer marketing slowed down. We’ve been working with Amanda Arrigotti-White from Curate & Co. on influencer marketing, social media advertising, and PR, and I would highly recommend working with them! They’ve also gotten us into about seven gift guides, including the Goop holiday gift list, which has really blown us out of the water. 

Before we started officially working with anybody, we looked for people on Instagram who would make sense to be featuring a cheese box. We also made sure they weren’t only being followed by other influencers, and definitely looked for local people in Boston. Starting small with micro-influencers who have two to five thousand followers is a great way to make it work for both of you. Right now, we’re going back to our roots with a few Food Network stars we’ve worked with in the past to do something a little more meaningful. It feels really natural, because they really love our box, and we can promote them while they promote us. It’s always best when it can be a very symbiotic relationship. 

A huge thank you to Jenn for being part of this Ask an Entrepreneur session! Interested in more insights from industry experts? Visit Branchfood’s membership opportunities, and check out our upcoming Holiday Bash on December 17th, 4:30-6:30pm ET, to connect with leaders in food and colleagues across the industry and discuss exciting things in store for 2021!