This Weighted Blanket Will Help You Sleep Better – Aaron Spivak of Hush Blankets

Sushant Misra 

Hey there entrepreneurs. My name is Sushant and welcome to Trep Talks. This is the show where I interview successful ecommerce entrepreneurs, business executives and thought leaders and ask them questions about their business story, and also dive deep into some of the strategies and tactics that they have used to start and grow their businesses. And today, I’m really excited to welcome Aaron spiewak to the show. Aaron is the co founder of harsh blankets, harsh blankets, create weighted blankets that help people to reduce stress and fall asleep faster. And today, I want to ask Aaron a few questions about his entrepreneurial story and some of the strategies and tactics that he has used to grow his business. So thank you so much for joining us today. Trep Talks.

Aaron Spivak of Hush Blankets 

Thank you so much for having me.

Sushant Misra 

So I know that you have started, you know, businesses in the past. So I’m really curious to know if you could share a little bit about your entrepreneurial journey and how do you come to how do you get the idea for Good.

Aaron Spivak of Hush Blankets 

Yeah, totally. I mean, I was I was always an entrepreneur, my, you know, naturally I would said I’d had the blog when I was such a young kid from, you know, selling hats and my mom used to knit in grade school to, you know, I have a window cleaning company where we would knock on doors and neighborhood and the friends would, you know, clean people’s windows. And in high school, I started a party bus company, which actually ended up selling at the end of high school. And at one point, we were doing about 900 proms a year facilitating all the buses getting people to and from prom and all that. So I always had a knack for, for really taking care of a need, or at least a need that I thought people had. And it was very fun. It was exciting. It was great to be, you know, that person taking care of an issue for people and for the hats, you know, people wanted custom hats and for the window cleaning people had dirty windows. They didn’t want to pay, you know, large companies and for the party buses. principals and and board members, were always concerned of drinking on the bus. So I knew if I could provide a safe and reliable solution, people would jump on that and I can get board members and principals on board to help support me. And then also, you know, who doesn’t want to support a student at the school, right? So I’ve always kind of had that thing and then in one year out of high school when I was 18, with along with my brothers and my mom, we started coal price juicing in my mom’s living room. And the the core behind that was we wanted to have a healthy alternative. I was an athlete, I played hockey my whole life. So we always were looking for ways to advance our health and our well being. And we did that through through juicing and through eating healthy and through healthy alternatives. And now at least in Toronto, seven years later, there’s a bunch of vegan and healthy options all around the city, but seven, eight years ago, when we started there was really nothing so people used to come Knock on my door at eight o’clock at night and be like, Hey, can we get some juice and we’d sell them right out of our house. And you know, fast forward a year, we saved up our money and invested into opening up our first location and no transform six, seven years down the road. We have we have 10 locations now we have an e commerce store and all that. And then a few years ago, my partner and I, we, we were we were just friends at the time. I both had our own businesses, and he kind of approached me and said, You know, I was paying some time volunteering at a camp and a camp for children with special needs. And they had a room they called the stimulation room. And it’s a room that has all kinds of different stimulation devices for whatever, you know, kids want to relax or sleep or for whatever reason. And he said, I always found myself in this room and I was I was constantly gravitating towards this heavy pad. It was like the best thing to sleep under. And that and then we we did some Research and we found that there was a Kickstarter that one guy ran which very similar product. And we were so mad because there was just no real weighted blanket that would fit on my bed and be comfortable and wouldn’t sound like a rain stick at night and was easily washable. Like, we just wanted our current debate to be heavy. We wanted all the beautiful luxuries of our current debate, but we wanted to wait. And we said, You know what, maybe we can come up one way we can make one. So we spent all of 2017 developing one product that we launched 2018, which is three skews. And fortunate enough, within a few months, we were able to completely sell out before we even got our inventory. And then yeah, I mean, that’s kind of where it started. And we’ve been fortunate enough to come out with new skews and develop and develop and from there but it really all started from from when I was a little kid

Sushant Misra 

and well that the entrepreneurial bug was that encouraged in your family like what were your parents entrepreneur themselves or was that something innate that you as a person had in yourself?

Aaron Spivak of Hush Blankets 

Yeah, that’s a great question. I think both, I think both I mean, I’ve four brothers as five boys in my family and we’re also different. But yeah, my mother was a natural entrepreneur. She’s she emigrated from Israel to Canada with three children in her 20s she had no English whatsoever so not had created English. And she, she started her own agency and you know, took her years to get her feet wet, I would say at least 10 or 12 years till she finally got a business going and know she built a really good business for a bunch of time before before that ended and you know, she was you know, growing up I got to watch her do this. So you know, as a kid, that whole monkey see monkey do might have a plan that and I always admired that and Guess that’s, you know, you can see that’s where I got it from.

Sushant Misra 

Can you share a little bit about what the blanket and weighted blanket industry looks like in North America? I’m assuming that blanket is such a generic product, there’d be a lot of competitors. Was that the case with weighted blankets also, and what was your value add that you brought with with the company that you created?

Aaron Spivak of Hush Blankets 

Yeah, I mean, the sleep space in general North America is is growing. I think it’s about a $6 billion industry and it only grows every year. And that’s sleep. When we started we were just focusing on people who suffer from anxiety and insomnia and then surrounding issues like ATD, ADHD and light saturation, stuff like that. Kids on the autism spectrum and and that was our main focus because we were more problem solution based in terms of competitors. Yeah, there, we’ve we’ve got a tremendous amount of competitors. We’ve got, you know, every every manufacturer in China is selling on Amazon. We’ve got five to seven local players in the Kenyan market, we got, you know, 50 to 60 players in the US market. However, I think the when we first started there was only about three or four and it’s grown since and it’s actually been great. competition has been an amazing thing because when we first started, there wasn’t much parity in the market. It was no there was one or two options to choose from and you know, if one offered a sale and the other one did it, then people will go to the one on a sale and it will go back and forth. But now there’s there’s great parity and people are actually able to see the difference in quality. Right? There’s, there’s blankets out there for $40. Right, and you know, shipping on our product is over $40 so we’re definitely the the premium we we spend a lot of money on r&d we do. We went above and beyond. You know, we would never sell a product that I wouldn’t use myself. And then that was a big thing and I know even with the juices with the party buses that was one of the best buses It was one of the best point if you want a blanket that actually works, we’re not interested in just you know making a sale and hooray and you know, you may or may not get a return but if that customer has a sour taste in their mouth and if they spent too much money and got a subpar product that didn’t sit well with with with me, I mean, I want people to feel like they got more bang for their buck. So you know we try to price ourselves competitively but when people feel our product and touch it, it really is game changing products are different. I mean in terms of differentiation between the product you know, we have 45 different skews most people are running with like a twin or a king option where you know, we’ve got skews from five pounds all the way to 35 pounds. 510 a 1215 2025 3035. We’ve got ranges from King to Queen to twin to teens to kids that throws summer really are the staple. If you are looking for a solution for your sleep, and you think a way to blank it is a space people will come to an option. You know, we’ve got warmer ones and cooler ones where you can choose exactly the one that fits your style, your bed, your weight, and your decor. Actually, we have different colors as well.

Sushant Misra 

So that’s pretty interesting. So let’s say that if I’m trying to buy your blanket, how would I know which way to go and buy? Is there like a criteria that a certain blanket would work better for me as opposed to someone else?

Aaron Spivak of Hush Blankets 

Yeah, of course. I mean, we recommend that people select blanket that is around 10% of your overall body weight. And then in situations where there’s two people sleeping in a bed, we ask you to add up your total weight and then do 10% of that. So for example, if there’s a king bed and there’s two people sleeping or the average weight is 300 pounds, for example, or like around 200 pounds, then you’ll get a king and 30 pound blanket. Because there’s just no there’s weight that’s not on you, there’s weight on off to the side. And then if you’re getting a more personal size, like a twin, and you know, you’re anywhere between, you know, 112 and 141 50, then you’ll get a 15 pounds anything above 20. And if you’re, you know, over 225, and you’ll get 25 pounds. So, yeah, we always recommend to get something within that 10% range of your weight.

Sushant Misra 

Okay. And initially, was there an idea validation process? So to me, it seems like you started out with this idea in the mind that, you know, this heavy wet blanket can be used for therapeutic purposes for certain therapeutic niches. But now, it seems like it’s become more of a consumer product. So was there like an idea validation process where you realize that, you know, it’s not just good for a therapy product, it can be more used as like a consumer Most consumer product

Aaron Spivak of Hush Blankets 

100% That was our goal from from the beginning, we didn’t want to just be super problem solution based. We believe that majority of us are not unlocking our sleep potential where we’re not really getting the quality of sleep that we can that we need. Many of us was sleeping between five and six hours. We have constant light saturation. Or depending on where you live, you might have underlied saturate your saturation. We’re not really taking advantage of our 45 to one hour of REM sleep, a lot of us are anxious. Touch now with with Corona and COVID and all these things going on. There’s so many reasons that keeps you up at night. So, for us, it’s not necessarily about Oh, you have a problem. We have a solution. It’s about do you feel like you can improve your sleep and, you know, we sleep between 25 and 35% of our entire lives. And not take That part of our life seriously, but the thing everything else part of our life seriously, is, you know, just not not the smartest thing to do, right? We have, you know, we eat, we actually we don’t even eat 30% of our lives of most facilities, right? We don’t eat 30% of our lives, right? So, you know, there’s nothing. There was nothing that we do other than sleep and be awake that is 33% of our lives or more. So we don’t even work depending on what your workload is. And if you actually look at the amount of time in your life that you’re working, you don’t even work 33% of your life. So it’s so rare to actually have something that that carries so much weight in our life yet so many of us are sleeping with, you know, toxic foam mattresses that are layered with glue down pillows that absorb bacteria, non non organic sheets that are made with all different types of dyes. And the same thing with our database if you see but the down Devey the way that was selected There’s so many things that we just, it’s not it’s not even our fault. There’s just no one has ever actually went about educating everyone in the bedroom was always about decor for so long not functionality and not not science. So being able to educate people on that and kind of seeing that transition over time has been has been amazing. We just see the reviews the say the way people have changed their lives, we’ve had people who who say they haven’t slept in seven years, there was more than a single hour and seven years achieve it four or five hours sleeps, which is groundbreaking when we look about the reproductive cycle, and you know, our immune system only heals itself at night. So there’s just so much about it, that we’re happy that our product can, you know, play a part and you know, the, the hush blanket isn’t gonna rewire your entire world, but it’ll definitely you know, give you one step forward in the right direction.

Sushant Misra 

So now when you look at your sales data or analytics, are you able to say that there is like one or two big segment that is your main customer. Your

Aaron Spivak of Hush Blankets 

Yeah, you mean like our demographic? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I find like that demographics usually usually are attributed to your source of traffic. So in terms of sources of traffic, we’re on, you know, the, the facebook, facebook, instagram, which is kind of same as Google and YouTube is our main source of traffic. So generally, we have Facebook, which is a 35 plus platform for the most part of Instagram, which is about 18 to 35. And up, then we have YouTube, which is pretty much anyone and Google which is search intent, which again is around 35 bucks for us. So our demo is generally 25 to 55. For the most part of what we have been trending younger, which is showing signs that we are In the better your sleep phase. So where our education is getting across, which is great. But yeah, that’s that’s really our demo.

Sushant Misra 

utility for YouTube is the YouTube ad for organic and ads both. Just

sorry, say that again.

Sushant Misra 

When you said a YouTube, is that YouTube ads, the traffic coming from AD do you run ads on YouTube?

Aaron Spivak of Hush Blankets 

Yeah, yeah, totally. We run. We run ads. Yeah, we run ads on it.

Sushant Misra 

So I know that so you started this business with a co founder, a friend of yours? I’m very curious to know, how does the, you know, can you share a little bit about the story of when you came together? Like maybe your co founder pitched this idea to you? How do you talk about equity division and what kind of legalities are involved in terms of you know, actually setting that up as the As a business?

Aaron Spivak of Hush Blankets 

Yeah, that’s that’s a great question. Actually, I was just having a conversation with our with another friend who’s about to start a business with his friend. And I think the most important thing when it comes to starting a business, and if you’re starting with a friend, I mean, I have business family business friend, I’ve done both. I’ve learned a lot and both of them. And the biggest thing is to have the hard conversations right away, like, right in the beginning, because if it goes the way you plan it to go, which is like, you know, straight up, that’s our plan, our plan is to even up up up but eventually be trending upwards, more ups and downs, then you’re going to be faced with realities of each of your lives, right. And if you’re different in age, if you’re 10 years apart, and let’s say you’re 25 and you’re your partner’s 35 and your partner is married, and you’re yet to be married. There’s so many different things you have to take into into account and not that it’s not going to work out. But if you don’t have those conversations of fret like, hey, what happens? When you you know, what happens if you get divorced? Yeah, you know what happens and you know those things you don’t want to have those conversations because it’s like, I’m never gonna get divorced But okay, but it’s over 51% chance that you do. So let’s, let’s let’s at least plan it right, we can change it. But let’s talk through what happens in that situation. Let’s, let’s talk through a situation where we make a million dollars in profit one year, and let’s run through a scenario. What would you do? What would I do? Right? Because what’s gonna happen is when we reach different points in our lives, we have different priorities. So today, starting your business, you and your partner have the same priority for the business to be successful. But in five years from now, your partner might have the priority of wanting to maintain a lifestyle, right? Maybe not been pushed, pushed so much, right, maybe maybe he’s comfortable, maybe let’s just maintain and grow slowly but You, on the other hand, don’t care to maintain so so then you want to put the money back into the business and keep growing. And that can cause a whole boatload of problems. And then you’ve got to buy each other out. And there’s just so much involved. And even if it’s friends, even if it’s fun, I mean, my partner’s one of my best friends. And but you know, we set in stone, we had a, we had a hard meeting right at the beginning and we said, what’s going to happen if this happens? Once we know we’re not married, but what’s going to happen when you do get married? What’s gonna happen if you do have children? What’s going to happen if we get an offer for someone, you know what some of the puts an offer sheet and wants to buy you out? And one of your partners says yes, and one of your partners says, No, these are huge problems. That can be avoided right in the beginning. And it can be avoided with putting the emotional excitement of starting a business away for a moment, because if you’re an entreprenuer You’re always excited like, you start spending all this time and stuff right. Put that all aside and lead And have a real conversation say, you know, who is going to be the CEO? What exactly are you going to do? What exactly am I going to do in this business? And how are how exactly are we going to grow this and it never goes to your plan but as long as you’re constantly on the same page from the beginning, you’ll be able to it’s kind of like a marriage you’ll kind of you know, you’ll be able to pick your partner up when he’s down in or she’s down and the other way around. But as long as you understand that the business is more important than the personal then at least for me, that’s been you know, I’ve had a few incorporations and none of them have split up or anything like that. So for me that’s what’s been working

Sushant Misra 

and and I guess it’s it’s probably a little bit easier when you’re trying to work with someone you already have some history with, rather than you know, if you just met someone two months ago, and then you’re trying to start a company with them, or or it doesn’t matter as long as you have those conversations and you get all the legal stuff done. Right.

Aaron Spivak of Hush Blankets 

Exactly.

Sushant Misra 

So you don’t think it makes any difference? Well,

Aaron Spivak of Hush Blankets 

good question. I mean, it can it can. Anyone can. It’s just I guess the underlying message is to run, like, right, make a list of every possible every possible worst thing that could happen. I know it’s very negative. And when you start a business, you want to be super positive. And it’s exciting. And there’s momentum, and there’s so much around it, but just take one day, out of all the excitement and say, let’s make a list of everything the worst that could happen. And let’s say and let’s put it together right now what we’re what we would do, and then you can go back and change it, you know, in a year, you as most vital so let’s revisit that list. Maybe we’ll walk a little differently, you know, let’s revisit that. But it’s important right now. they’re beginning to set it up in a way where you have kind of a code of conduct that you both can trust. And that’s the most one that you want to trust. And you can trust that to fall back on when things you know go one way or another right when you’re when your return on adspend falls through the roof and one partner wants to keep it going because you want the customer and the other one was to stop it because he wants to profit all those things you have to take into account.

Sushant Misra 

So can you take us to the first few months of your business when when you had the idea and you were working on the prototype? Did you have to put given that you already have both had your own businesses did you put certain financing your personal money in the in the business to build those first prototypes? And what was that whole process like?

Aaron Spivak of Hush Blankets 

Yeah, so you know my I’ve always bootstrapped our business. My Businesses I don’t have the great fortune I don’t have the great fortune of coming from you know a rich family or I can just get a loan or some sort of gift or whatever I’ve always had to kind of save up and put all my eggs in that basket. Now when we started the juice business we choose to add to the house for a whole year saving up the money then open up the store which we still fell short on but and in same with hush hush I was you know I’ve saved up my money from from the juice business for three years and put it all into hush and same with my partner he had a software business he saved up all his money and put it all in dosh and sometimes I some people can’t stomach that right and that’s one of the benefits of starting a business when you’re younger because you know if you have a wife and kids and a mortgage, taking all your money and throwing out a business idea is probably not the smartest thing to do. But in your in your you know I was in my 20s I had my only liabilities were rented a car which can both be eliminated, I had the opportunity to fail. So yeah, I was completely bootstrapped. We put everything we had into my really full time.

Sushant Misra 

And how did you get your prototypes created? Like, did you hire a company to to create the initial product? Or what was that process like?

Aaron Spivak of Hush Blankets 

So I pretty much bought every single competitor, our similar product out on the market that was available. And I basically pick them apart, cut them open, slice them up, sent fabric samples out to some labs out in the US, which is really cheap. I’ll tell you exactly what the competition is. And I really studied my competition and saw and went on their support channels and I messaged them and asked them difficult questions. And I really gathered as much information as possible to see what makes them what is their what are their holes, what are the holes in their product, where the holes in their business and I did that Across the board who I thought were my biggest competitors, and then I set out to build a product that was just as good, but it didn’t have any of the holes. And it was it was significantly better right out the gate. So yeah, I mean pictures argue we did that. And then we found a supplier who was willing to support support us in producing that, right. A lot of times when you’re creating a product, your suppliers gonna have high mo cues when you’re customizing your product. And that’s very expensive, right? So finding that relationship where you have a supplier who believes in your product and that you can not have huge mo cues that that really puts you in a bind to start, right.

Sushant Misra 

And this whole research process and building the prototype was it’s like a period of weeks or months. How much

Aaron Spivak of Hush Blankets 

is a full year actually, it’s a full year and you know, our trick was, you know, we were buying like $15,000 worth of competitors price. is quite expensive but for the most part, a lot of them had really good return policy. So we’d bring it in for like 30 days, we, we learn everything about it and then we ship it back we keep doing that over and over again and recycle our money. So and that by the end of it, we actually ended up keeping everything and I’ve got a storage locker right now every single one of my competitors blankets in it, just really understand and you know, like, you know, we use glass beads glass and they’re microbeads they’re the size, their glass the size of sand. And the reason I even got that was because cutting open competitors blanket I noticed they’re using plastic poly pellets which are essentially toxic pellets. They’re very, very cheap to make but they’re big and they sound like marbles when you move at night. And overall they’re there talks about how to sleep with so if it wasn’t for that doing that research phase I wouldn’t have known to to develop the glass which is completely clean, safe, environmentally safe, and because they’re so small they don’t make any noise

Sushant Misra 

So after you had this product, which was better than any of the competitor products out there, when you launched how, what was that first year like for you in terms of marketing and sales? And how did you get your first sales in that first year?

Aaron Spivak of Hush Blankets 

Yeah, I mean, when we when, you know, when we launched, there was one thing we didn’t want to do. We don’t we did not want to drop ship anything. Because no offense to dropshippers. But drop shipping is about making money. That’s this. Let’s just call it what it is. You’re dropshipping because you want to flip $1 for two. That’s it. We weren’t in we had no, we both had working businesses. We weren’t interested in just earning money. Because we can just keep doing what we’re doing where the money we were interested in building a brand that people would recognize and would trust when it comes to improving their sleep. An only way to do that was to hold bring in inventory, and to show people through marketing and through our brand, that this product is the solution to what they’re looking for. So our main channel right off the bat was Google we had, we wanted to target people who were specifically searching for a need and for a product that we offered a solution for. And then we match that up with just some simple retargeting on Facebook. And we were able to actually make a couple sales in our first day. And it hasn’t quite stopped since then, really?

Sushant Misra 

And did you were you given that your product was kind of unique? Were you able to get some initial press and that if you have that help at all?

Aaron Spivak of Hush Blankets 

Yes, that’s a really good question. I mean, when we launched our Kickstarter out in 2019, was the first time I mean really went after press. It was really hard. I don’t know maybe I’m moving. I just suck at PR. But it was hard. It was it was tough to get press it was it was just sending hundreds of emails a day and different types of press releases, and we’re split testing email headers, and it was it was, it was tough when we did we got really good press. We were in all the top magazines and all that we ended up being successful at it, but I don’t think press was was a main needle mover for us whatsoever.

Sushant Misra 

Okay, so I want to ask a couple of questions about your appearance on Dragon’s Den. Can you share from your perspective, what was the the rationale behind going on Dragon’s Den? Because I think at that point, you were already your sales. Were pretty good. So I think you already had money. Was it more of a strategic decision to say you know, these dragons, these businesses can help you get into retail or the different channels so we thought what what was the the reason for going to Dragon’s Den?

Aaron Spivak of Hush Blankets 

through a question and it’s a it’s a great assumption actually was that on? So Dragon’s Den was something we didn’t give as much thought to as it seemed. It was a spontaneous, I follow one of the dragons on Instagram, they had a swipe up to submit an application to audition, I just swiped up, filled it out. I got an email a few weeks later saying there’s a first level of auditions is coming up in a few weeks and I was like, you know, era let’s give this a go. And we went and we were unprepared. We didn’t bring the proper materials. We didn’t have a pitch. We didn’t know what we were doing. Fully botched it. We didn’t think we would make it to the second level and then a few weeks later got a call. He said, Hey, come to the second level and, and then at that point we took it very seriously. We took it very seriously. We started treating it like it was supposed to be treated. We did a ton of research on every single one of the dragon that we spoke to hundreds of people pitch them before we hired a pitch specialist like we went. Have you see the pitch? I mean, it’s rated the best pitch of the season for a reason that we were we were extremely strategic in the way we spoke to them. We we have this giveback program where we donate a time we were made a huge emphasis on that. And our goal honestly was to speak to the people watching. We weren’t so interested in. That’s not necessarily true. But we were more interested in speaking to the 35,000 people watching you live rather than the four or six Dragons, you know, watching in front of you. So we went in with it and say, okay, there is six dragons in front of us very important, very powerful people will and can help us in our future. But there’s 35,000 other people right behind them, who may actually be able to help us right away and support us to become customers of the business. And that was our goal. And and, you know, if you watch the pitch, and if you have or you haven’t, you’ll Yeah, you’ll see the way that it moves you in the way you feel. And that was our goal. Our goal was to was to leverage the way that you’re gonna feel just watching it.

Sushant Misra 

And one of the things that I also felt and you know, I want to know your opinion is that maybe the the reason that dragons were so interested in your business was because number one, it was already profitable, and it was growing. And number two, they could probably see that both of the co founders had a entrepreneurial history and you know, they You’re kind of like a proven entrepreneur so that kind of takes away risk for for anyone who’s investing in ambit. Do you think that that part of partly hurt your success on the show?

Aaron Spivak of Hush Blankets 

Um, I don’t think so. I mean, they didn’t know anything about us. It was the first day where we walked into the den was the first time they saw our faces. They didn’t. They had no idea who we were. And we didn’t. We

Sushant Misra 

don’t they don’t know anything about the business beforehand.

Aaron Spivak of Hush Blankets 

They know nothing. Yeah, it’s the first time they’re hearing about us. So they don’t know too much about us. They ask a lot of questions. I mean, we’re there for almost an hour and only show five minutes. Right. So they do we do get deep. We do talk a lot. We do talk a lot. And yeah, I think I think what they loved about us about us was how different we were and how we didn’t only have like a regular debate, we have the ice that we have multiple options. So I think there was a lot of levers around it and It was an emotional pitch. It was an emotional pitch, we really left our heart out on the table. And, and we feel that they felt that right. They felt that in there and they responded, you know, great. We were very happy with the response.

Sushant Misra 

Yeah, and one question I want to ask about is the valuation of your company, of course, the valuation of any company, it depends on, you know, what, what the investor is willing to, you know, say that your company is worth. But when you asked for the certain amount of money for a certain percentage of your company, could you share, you know, what was your rationale behind coming up for that valuation? And do you think that you undervalued your company because everyone wanted to pay you more for your company than than what you had valued?

Aaron Spivak of Hush Blankets 

Yeah, first time in 14 years of that show, did the valuation increase on television, so did we undervalue Yeah, we did. We did undervalue the business. It was a strategic. No, I don’t think it was strategic. I think we were just a little bit nervous that we would come in at such a high number. And they would immediately be like, Whoa, no chance go home kind of thing.

Sushant Misra 

And your valuation strategy was, you know, to see that what our revenue number was last year and just say that, you know, five X to eight x of that number, or how did you come up with that number?

Aaron Spivak of Hush Blankets 

Uh, yeah, that’s, that’s a good question. It was really hard to come up with that number. It wasn’t, it wasn’t simple. recalled all kinds of people. We didn’t. We didn’t necessarily have enough data to to draw a real evaluation. We had a full year and four months. So you know, we had a really good four months we just came off you know, that episode was shot right after our Kickstarter campaign. So was a really good four months, but we had no real data to show that there’s any real growth year Oh, we haven’t we haven’t even had a year over year. And at that time, so, for us, what we did is we we rounded off what 2019 was going to be. And then we times that by two, which is what we did two times revenue model ended up being way off. So, but that was what we did at the time. We asked a few people it seemed to have made sense. And then yeah, we kind of just, we took that number and we actually reduced it by, I think, half a million or a million just because we were we didn’t want to come off as overpriced on the show. And

Sushant Misra 

yeah, that’s what it was for what happens after the show. So you you you got the deal. I’m sure there was some due diligence process, some some legal you know, agreement finding and things like that. What is it like working with these business people? What kind of support to the provide you after the the deal is done?

Aaron Spivak of Hush Blankets 

Yeah, so so basically on the show the deal is like it’s a handshake deal. It’s not real in the sense. There is due diligence that you do after the show. And they know they get these people, their accountants, and they negotiate and the deal actually dragged the negotiations dragged on all the way until the episode actually aired. And when the act when the episode aired, we actually earned in that time frame more than what we were going to get from the dragons. Hmm. So it became less about the money and more about What what we can you know, how we can work together and how we can get? How can it be a mutually beneficial business for both of us, but from their, from their perspective, which, you know, we totally agree with. It was two people splitting, you know, 4% each. It’s not so much you’re gonna you’re gonna go out of your way and do for 4% of a business, right? Yeah. Especially if you’re if you’re if you’re parting ways with $400,000. Right. So we we actually mutually decided that it wasn’t necessarily worth anyone’s time for us. It wasn’t worth. We didn’t we didn’t necessarily have an immediate need or use for the money. And for them, they didn’t necessarily have anything that they were willing to put on the table as an immediate value add for our business. So it was kind of a transaction that over time, although wasn’t Amazing on the den, but as time went on, became, you know, as hindsight became 2020 wasn’t necessarily worth it for either of us. So, you know, we still keep in touch them here and there. I mean, they’re incredible people, really, they’ve done just by being on the show and the way the reaction is done a lot for our business. So it was it was a great experience. Really, I learned a lot.

Sushant Misra 

Okay, that’s, that’s very interesting. Very briefly, I wanted to ask you about your kit, the Kickstarter campaign that you run, and that was also very successful. What can you share? What was the What was the reason for its success? The campaign?

Aaron Spivak of Hush Blankets 

Yeah, well, there’s a reason to your question.

Sushant Misra 

Like, did you run a very good marketing campaign for the for your Kickstarter campaign?

Aaron Spivak of Hush Blankets 

Yeah, I mean, we we shot we flew out. We basically launched in 2019. On the back of one of the worst summer ever in 2018, and we went from making when we first started, I think like 10 or 15 sales a day, and then in the summer we’re making with zero or one. Okay? And it was it was just awful is actually the point where we’re gonna close the business down and say this is just not worth any of our time. And I was like, yo, let’s send out a survey to all of our customers. And let’s ask them why they would not buy the way in the summer. And all of them responded saying it’s just, we need a cooling option, we need a cooler option, we need a cooler option. So they are and you know, coming back to your first question about setting things up with your partner. We said something and stolen and we’re not going to if this business is a seasonal business, we’re not we’re out. We have no we want no intention of being part of a seasonal bit. Yes, there’s gonna be you know, In the busier seasons, but we want to be able to sell 12 months here, not only in the winter, so we went and we developed the cooler option. And the way we did that was actually binding different fabrics together. And when we successfully did that, in order to get that done, you need to order a large amount of fabric from the mill in order to get your price to where it needs to be. And we weren’t we didn’t have the capital or we weren’t really that willing to spend that much money on a product, we haven’t even sold one up. So where else better to go when you have a prototype of a really cool product, but not enough money to produce Kickstarter. So we dump all our money into that campaign. Everything we made over the last year and we said we’re gonna have either a successful Kickstarter or we’re not gonna have a business anymore. It’s one or the other and Yeah, we we set up we you know, the video we shot in LA. We, you know, we knew there was a need for the product weighted blankets I’ve done historically pretty well on Kickstarter. We know there’s never been a cooling option, we know that every person that’s ever bought a weighted blanket on Kickstarter is in the same as our customer wants a cooling option. So we made one that was compatible with all the previous way of life that were sold. So and then yeah, we we launched and we had a lot of our own customers, and we did a lot of lead gen. And you know, what turned out to be for a Canadian campaign it was that it turns to be in the top 10 of all time most raised. So it was a great campaign.

Sushant Misra 

That’s pretty good. So what are all the channels that you’re in right now? So you’re an ecommerce, I believe you’re selling on Amazon, and you’re also selling retail? Oh,

Aaron Spivak of Hush Blankets 

yeah, we actually haven’t been on Amazon. If you see us on Amazon. Probably just a reseller trying to make some money which is fine and we just got reinstated actually yesterday funny enough we were banned from Amazon for eight months from something we didn’t do one of our resellers, which is why you probably saw us try to trademark our name and you can’t can’t trademark name you don’t have right so they thought that we were him and he was us. So they kept him alive. They banned us because they thought we were the the fate. So it took us a while. Obviously we have a trademark so we had to send documents and Amazon’s very slow so eight months later we just got reinstated yesterday which is amazing news. So we will be on Amazon. We sell on Hodgman cars.ca sporting goods.com.com services, the UK and the EU and all of the US and then.ca services all Canada, we don’t sell in Australia just yet, or like Singapore or anywhere in Asia or the Middle East. And then that’s pretty much it. There’s, we sell to retailers. We have a wholesale division, we have a wholesale team, and they sell to over 450 different retail shops across Canada and the US. So we’re a bunch of locations there. And that’s,

Sushant Misra 

so I’m assuming your retail business is much larger than your ecommerce or

Aaron Spivak of Hush Blankets 

no, no, definitely not. Retail is about 5% of our overall business. Oh, really? Well, yeah. So I mean, we’re, we have two full time. We have a director of sales and a head of sales that work together hand in hand, and they’re both incredible, credible people and great, great gentlemen that do a really good job for us and they’ve single handedly grown our our wholesale department from Um, you know, been really a fraction of a percent of our business to now 5% which is which is pretty significant growth.

Sushant Misra 

Okay, one thing because your product is so heavy, can you share a little bit about your fulfillment? Is it that you charge the customer for the shipping or? Or no,

Aaron Spivak of Hush Blankets 

no, we don’t actually we we offer free shipping worldwide depends where you are, but pretty much North American wide free shipping. We when we first started, we used FBA as our fulfillment centers, you can do multi channel fulfillment and just so fulfill for ecommerce store to them but because there’s one complain that they would get a box with Amazon but they didn’t even order it. So we then shifted to a three PL and was a horrible experience. We use them for our Kickstarter and they they lost us Tremendous amount of money, a tremendous amount of product they missed orders the wrong people, it was just a mess. And it was so bad that we actually went and we invested into our own warehouse. So we developed a 25,000 square foot warehouse of our own. We built an office on top. And you know, we have all of our inventory in one place we ship nationally from one spot. And it’s been incredible we’ve we’ve actually been able to beat FBA shipping times, for the most part. So it’s been, you know, you place an order, it gets fulfilled within, you know, depending on the time of day, in seconds. So quite amazing.

Sushant Misra 

I want to talk a little bit about the marketing. I know you mentioned previously a little bit about you know, you’re doing good. Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Google ads. One thing that I found very interesting, I think I read somewhere is that you’re doing SMS marketing. So can you talk a little bit about in terms of effectiveness of marketing like getting new customers in the pipeline, which channels work really well for you, and how effective is SMS marketing? And what was the reason behind that?

Aaron Spivak of Hush Blankets 

Well, you definitely follow me on LinkedIn. So that’s awesome. Yeah, SMS is something we took very seriously, I would say October of 2019. Last year. Email, email rates are dropping, you know, open rates are dropping, it’s just it is what it is. And everyone’s getting emails all day, every day from from everyone. And it’s really hard to maintain a engaged audience via email. So we know one thing for sure we know that SMS, if it gets through, it’s 100%. Open, everybody opens up their text at some point throughout the day. It’s you know, we don’t necessarily have great filters like we do on our inbox yet. I mean, eventually, once everyone’s SMS, I think there’ll be some filters and rules in place. But right now there’s not so yeah, I mean, it’s amazing that we can have and build quality relationships through SMS, right? Like, I personally will send messages that to people and say, hey, how’s your day going? How’s the hush? No, you got it two weeks ago, talking about it, how is it? And they’ll respond and it’s just from their phone that they’re texting with their friends and you know, how we grow that we grow that on our site? You know, we are often our opt in now is don’t give me your email, give me your number. You know, let’s chat. Let’s chat. Let’s let’s have a conversation. I you know, let’s post some on LinkedIn too. You know that I genuinely care a ton about our customers even till today. I’m on the chat. So almost every night. Obviously, I can’t get to everybody, but I try to answer at least 100 chats every night. And just just to chat to people and just see what see what the overall consensus Yeah, people are feeling. You know, well, what brings you here? What like, why are you on hospital? dot ca.com right now, what’s that problem was that solution? First time customers second time customers in the VIP club. You’re not in the VIP club. There’s so many things that we can communicate but I don’t need to communicate via email. I don’t need to send you a long email. You don’t need to send me a long email. It’s just simple text and say Hey, how’s it going? You know, then I can give you yes, no, cool. So yeah, SMS is great. I first I love it. I really love it.

Sushant Misra 

Which SMS marketing platform do you use?

Aaron Spivak of Hush Blankets 

We’re using PostScript

Sushant Misra 

was great. Okay. Can you can you share a little bit about your team? And especially I’m interested in know how big is your marketing team and given you know, the recent growmark pandemic and everything how, what systems How have you been? Being being productive in managing your team? Like what what system have you created to to manage and make sure everything is working right?

Aaron Spivak of Hush Blankets 

Yeah, obviously we were all in office before the pandemic, so everyone going home. Yeah, put the new things in place. Because the work the culture is different. It’s really tough to build culture when you’re working from home. But yeah, we’re 16 big. Our team and our Google is in house or Facebook is in house. Our creative and content team is in house. Our social team is in house. Our affiliate and influencer side of management is in house. Our wholesale like I mentioned before, it’s in house or fulfillment is in house.

Sushant Misra 

Everything around a bit.

Aaron Spivak of Hush Blankets 

Yeah, everyone’s trying to base our customer service team. We have a few Toronto base, a few in the US, one in Texas, one in Delaware, one in Croatia and one in one in India. Our managers in India is amazing. And one in the Philippines. We do that because we want to be of service 20 hours a day. So it’s good to have different people in different time zones.

Sushant Misra 

And do you use like, some team management software from things like that just to keep updated on everything? Or are there like managers who actually are responsible for their demon and they report to you?

Aaron Spivak of Hush Blankets 

Yeah, I mean, that’s that’s a great question. I don’t I don’t believe in micromanaging. I don’t think I hated it as a person. I hate when people try to micromanage me, and I hate micromanaging people. I don’t think that people need to babysit, if they do need a babysitter, they’re probably not right for this specific team. Maybe they go somewhere else where they micromanage you know, some people are being told exactly what to do every single minute. I don’t like telling people what to do. And I don’t want to hire people that like being told what to do, you know, so I don’t, we basically use I mean, all depends on what you’re doing. If you’re in the wholesale division, then then you don’t have So they have a task manager that you’re working with you are, you’re simply working with your CRM, and you’re working with support to enable the transactions to go through the way you want. So, you know, bring on a client, you set them up. And support will help facilitate the transaction, make sure to get their bike into the approximate time, stuff like that. So and then we have a lead, they’re basically, you know, sourcing and hunting. So they have their own process, creatively use multiple platforms. They’ll use platforms for storage, they’ll use platforms for organization, they’ll use platforms for task management. So for task management, for example, we’ll use Monday monday.com, which has been great. And we use Monday and then we’ll use some calendar apps to integrate with that and we’ll use later and link tree and all these different types of social platforms to help organize our posts and structuring. Then we have an overall marketing calendar that that Build just on Excel, actually, the entire team will reference. So our Facebook team will pop on there and see what’s going on and prepare, our creative team will pop on there and make sure it’s going to care that we have an influencer and affiliate calendar that syncs directly with with Monday. So our affiliate manager will update that. So it’s there’s very little overlap between any of the of the, of the different divisions within the business, there’s very, very little overlap. Lee or my partner and I will kind of be that overlap, we will be that overlap, we’ll step in and we’ll connect groups and we’ll double check. But we don’t do performance reviews every day, every week or every month where we’re very quarterly where we’re checking in, we’re helping, if I check in with with a group, you know, if I check in with creative, it’s not, Hey, what are you doing, you know, prove to me that you’re worth it or whatever. It’s more about, you know, hey, what’s cool, what’s your problems? How can we help? How would you agree to speed things up as we get to where we go and then Really what it is, I mean, I know we believe we have a very talented team. And for the most part, a lot of them are doing their jobs better than I can either job so I’m not here to tell them what to do. I’m just here to support that and, you know, see if I can do anything. Okay.

Sushant Misra 

Finally, what has been, in your opinion, a one or two biggest mistakes or, or failures that have been made in starting and running hush blankets, and what have you learned or what can other entrepreneurs learned from those mistakes?

Aaron Spivak of Hush Blankets 

Yeah, that’s a good question. I think biggest mistakes. I wouldn’t even necessarily say different mistakes. I’ll be honest. I just didn’t have the information that I have now. So I made decisions based on the information that I had.

So I wouldn’t say I would say they were the best decision I could have made at the time

Aaron Spivak of Hush Blankets 

you know, in our in our first A year or 20 2018 black the Christmas season Black Friday Cyber Monday. Canada’s Boxing Day there’s there’s the pre there’s a last chance there’s, there’s there’s so much going on, but we It was our first time really doing ads. So we had an 11 x row as first year. And we were like is amazing, you know, like you’re making every dollar we’re putting in we’re getting $11 back like we’re geniuses like it’s the best thing ever. You know, little did we know it was like we were putting 1000 bucks in getting like 1100 dollars back You know? And and literally knowing what I know now like it was a mistake because what we should have done was scale up to you know, more reasonable three or four x row as and you know, spend instead of 100 $1,000 a day and make $4,000 back instead of 100 to make 1100 and acquire those customers. So but it did Know that at the time, you know, so at the time was the best possible decision we could have made. It was amazing decision, right? But now looking back, we’re able to understand that there’s differences. There’s different businesses, there’s different business mindsets. So I would say that’s one of the mistakes. I mean, we made many, many mistakes with inventory. We sold out we oversold so many times. I mentioned before the three piano we hired a three piano over promised and under delivered to us and at the time, they have this big beautiful office and they work with some of the biggest companies so at the time, it was the best decision I could be making hired experts they know exactly what they’re doing. But hindsight it was all facade. Maybe you don’t mean nothing. You know, they had no their systems were fake. You know, they said they had these things when they did it. They really found out what it was too late. So I guess if you’re listening to this, and you’re like, how is this gonna help me? Because everything I said to you was so good. ticular to me, how is this gonna help it really like what I said originally was like in terms of like, we’re setting things in stone, you’re starting your business. That that’s this, that’s all comes out, right? Like it all comes out when you’re looking at an 11 x row and you’re spending 100 bucks. In the beginning, we set in stone that we’re going to scale, no matter what every dollar we make, we’re going to put back in that we would never have made that mistake of accepting 11 rows because we would have pushed the pace, we would have pushed it to a four or five x or three X, whatever was profitable at that time, or breakeven at that time. Right. And, and the, you know, again, in the beginning, we said instantly when you set installments, you’re only going to work with people that you can speak to their customers. If you’re gonna hire agencies where you can call their best customers, ask them how it went. Right then we would have avoided the three PL because eventually I spoke to other customers and I’m like, how are you guys surviving with these people because I’m like, I’ve just joined them. It’s a nightmare and they’re like, we’ve been trying to get out forever. Heard, I’m like, Oh my god, I wish I called you before. So if you set it up in a way in the beginning, where we’re not going to make a decision and an uninformed decision with the information is out there. And if you’re listening to this right now, then you’re obviously seeking information. We’re trying to give it to you listening, giving it to you receiving it, hopefully writing it down, if not, whatever. But in the beginning, if you take that if you if you take it seriously, and say, these are the things that are non negotiables. When we write a PPO, we’re buying insurance, right? There’s typhoons in China right now, there’s boats getting blown over, you don’t buy insurance, you lose your home to, right. So there’s certain things that have to be non negotiables. And we didn’t have as non negotiables, because we didn’t know and there was no one like me on a podcast telling you that you’re listening or whoever else is listening to do this, but once you set those non negotiables, like now for example, for us to hydrate agency, it’s like they got to pull every single tooth out of her mouth. It’s, you know, as opposed to in the beginning, an agency will call up and say we can double your business and we’re like, yes, you’re hired double the business, please. Right. And, you know, they’re now the question is, oh, you’re gonna double the business, how they can show me exactly how you’re going to double the business. And oftentimes, they show you what you’re already doing. They’re like, well, thank you so much. Right? appreciate appreciate you doing absolutely nothing. So I don’t waste my time. Right. And sometimes they’ll they’ll show you a 10 step plan. There’s one small thing that there was a nugget in there, they’re like, Oh, my God, I can actually use that. Appreciate that. Thank you. Move on, right. And sometimes blow your whole cap off and you’re like, boom, you’re hired, right? So for us it was it’s important to set those things in stone and now after all these, you know, after two and a half years feeling, Ted you know, we’re planning our cold q4 launch. Now it’s in September 1, we’re planning like, all of Black Friday, all of cyber Monday, all the inventory. The whole thing has been planned now like this. Week, as opposed to last year, we planned it four days before. So like it was a mess and the thing didn’t work. And you know, like, we know how to treat Facebook, for example, you can’t just double your spend overnight. Not a smart thing to do, right? Facebook sees as a big red flag. We did that on Black Friday last year about banned from Facebook for a full two days only God knows what our potential a little bit right? So little mistakes like that, that all come from our lack of putting things in stone in the beginning, following them, respecting them, allowing them to change, right, allowing yourself to change and following it and then also trusting your gut right making whatever you think is the right decision at that time.

Sushant Misra 

That’s really great. I know we’re running out of time. I want to do a rapid fire round that will only take two minutes. So the the idea is that I’ll ask you a few questions and you have to answer them in one or two words or one or two sentences. Sure. First, Question is, do you have any book recommendations for entrepreneurs or business executives in 2020? And why do you read a lot of books?

Aaron Spivak of Hush Blankets 

I don’t read a lot of books, but I definitely read some. When I traveled more, I used to read more. The culture code by Dan Coyle is an incredible book, if you’re trying to build a team, even if you have a team of one to three, how to deal with people, what makes people move, they’ll be surprised, as you may or may not already know, it’s not always money.

Sushant Misra 

An innovative product or idea in the current ecommerce retailer tech landscape that you’re excited about.

Aaron Spivak of Hush Blankets 

I love SMS. I think SMS is so innovative, it’s so new, it’s so untouched. Um, and yeah, I think that’s going to be the biggest needle mover for a lot of brands.

Sushant Misra 

A productivity tool or software or idea that you use to to be more productive or do you recommend

Aaron Spivak of Hush Blankets 

I use my Google Calendar. Like it’s everything I schedule every single thing of my day from waking up to working out to eating to breakfast, to showers to lunch, to meetings to getting jobs done. I’m like a robot. So my tool is having yourself organized. Using your time wisely. And yeah, having a really clean cut calendar that you actually follow.

Sushant Misra 

And if you say that, you know, you’ve scheduled 30 minutes for a workout, it’s like you are going to do that in that 30 minutes. So you’re able to follow every little thing on your calendar.

Aaron Spivak of Hush Blankets 

Yeah, I mean, that’s what I want you to take top right now, I had to reschedule this by 30 minutes because I forgot that I had my schedule my workout scheduled, I could not do it because it’s dead on my schedule. So I had to like, do a shift and I took 15 minutes off of that and then out of 15 minutes the next one, so yeah, everyone knows me knows that my eyes I won’t even answer the phone call. If I have to do something else. I won’t even see my phone. Actually, no notifications are all off. Like right now. Who knows, I can get 100 calls right now everything’s off. This is my schedule times what I’m doing. I’m focused and locked in, and then boom, I move on to the next thing next,

Sushant Misra 

a beer entrepreneur or business person who inspires you

Aaron Spivak of Hush Blankets 

a lot right now. Now, there’s a good friend of mine but a guy named Chris Giles, semi retired now but really look up to a lot of things that he’s he’s done in his life and how he lives his life, which is most important. And actually, I cut my cousin who’s, she just turned 46 because birthdays high birth to him and just, you know, business. Yeah, they’re both really good at business, but just the way they live life and the way they carry themselves is something I admire for sure.

Sushant Misra 

And finally, best business advice that you ever received or you would give to other entrepreneurs. The

Aaron Spivak of Hush Blankets 

best business advice I’ve ever received was to pay more attention to your customers than your competitors. It’s very easy to get wrapped up in what your competitors are doing. People who are paying you money are way more important, and you should pay a lot more attention to them.

Sushant Misra 

And those were all the questions that I had. Aaron, thank you so much for your time. You’re very generous with your time. Really, really appreciate that. And now is your time to share your website where people can go and buy your products.

Aaron Spivak of Hush Blankets 

Yeah, I mean, if you’re looking for a better sleep, and you’re in Canada, it’s hush blankets.ca for anywhere else in the world. It’s hush blankets.com. If you want to hear more from me, follow me on LinkedIn. It’s just Aaron w AR o n speedback, SPI v AK. And I try to accept pretty much all connections as much as I can. So I want to get in touch. That’s where to find me.

Sushant Misra 

Perfect. Thank you so much. I really appreciate you sharing your entrepreneurial story and all the different strategies and tactics that you used. grow your business. So really, really appreciate your time. And thanks for joining us at TrepTalks.