Joe Welstead
Co-Founder, Oshun · Co-Founder, JAW Studios
Episode #8 · October 21, 2026Boring is Expensive
Joe Welstead put electrolytes in a pump bottle because it was convenient, not to cause a stir. The internet called it chaos packaging, but Joe calls it common sense: make something people want to talk about, and everything else in your marketing gets cheaper.
He learned to think like a champion in a Scottish pool, where a coach’s prediction got him out of bed at 5am for four straight years, and a promise to outwork everyone carried him onto Team Scotland. These days, he still works hard, just not for long. With a hard stop at 6pm when his kids get home, Joe is proof that a balanced life isn’t the opposite of ambition. It’s the secret to success.
Worth a look
Some of the goodies mentioned, just one click away.Joe’s Work
DIRT, high-polyphenol olive oil, available on Amazon UK
Joe's three-step product validation framework
Joe on LinkedIn, Instagram, and X
The Soundtrack
“Now We Are Free,” Hans Zimmer, from the Gladiator soundtrack (Joe’s pre-race pick)
“Don’t Tell Your Dreams,” STOSLIV and LOVIXX
“El Kilo,” Orishas
Books & References Mentioned in the Episode
Chaos packaging, the term coined by Michael Miraflor
“Ice Cream Tubs of Tampons and Sunscreen From a Whipped Cream Can: Welcome to Chaos Packaging,” The Wall Street Journal
How Brands Grow, Byron Sharp
Horace, French men’s grooming
Wyde, Swedish barefoot footwear
2 Ways to Listen, Wherever You Already Hit Play
The Brand BuilderFrom a French childhood and a Scottish pool to selling Motion Nutrition and bootstrapping Oshun past 10,000 subscribers, Joe’s path runs through 5am alarms, a 35-hour work week, and one influencer who tried to bottle his idea. This one’s the full story.
The PO NotesWhy boring is expensive, how a pump bottle became chaos packaging by accident, and the dartboard Joe uses to stay cool, calm, and collected under pressure. If you’ve only got fifteen minutes, start here.
Show Transcript
Intro Phillip Oakley: Today's guest once set a goal so big it got him out of bed at 5am for four straight years … and then spent a good chunk of the next decade questioning whether anyone should live that way.
Phillip Oakley: Born in Scotland to a Scottish dad and an American mom, he grew up in France and took a gap year in Australia. He hadn't even made his university swim team when his coach put the weight of a prediction on his shoulders: he'd be a Commonwealth Games athlete in four years. And four years later, that prediction came true.
Phillip Oakley: From the pro swimming pool, he went to London and co-founded Motion Nutrition, born out of an athlete's frustration with low-quality supplements. Along the way, he co-hosted the Anti-Hustle Hustle Club, a podcast challenging hustle culture and rewriting what work and success look like.
Phillip Oakley: These days, he's the co-founder of Oshun, an electrolyte brand that looks more at home next to your skincare than in a gym bag. Its chaos packaging was so unexpected, one design publication rudely commented they'd forgotten to hire a designer. Well, the joke's on them. Bootstrapped and profitable from month one, Oshun has now passed 10,000 subscribers, sold over 100,000 units, and now comes in a glass bottle, completely plastic free.
Phillip Oakley: He's also a co-founder of JAW Studios, a startup studio focused on human joy in a world full of technology. Its latest launch is DIRT, a high-polyphenol olive oil in a bottle that looks like it belongs on a cologne shelf.
Phillip Oakley: He believes that if you make a product that isn't boring, the rest of your marketing works harder. Whoop whoop! He also lives by the philosophy that if you build a company around your life, not the other way around, you might actually enjoy the ride. Off the clock, he's back in France with his family, living proof that "health nut" and "dad" can share the same Instagram bio. Joe Welstead, welcome to The PO Show.
Joe Welstead: Thank you so much. That was awesome to hear. I'm happy to be here.
Phillip Oakley: Well, that's because you're awesome, man. I'm telling you, digging into this stuff, I'm like, well, I knew he did that. Holy crap, that's really cool. You're a rock star, man.
The Appetizers Phillip Oakley: All right, so let's get right into the appetizers. A few years back, you co-hosted the Anti-Hustle Hustle Club. It was a wonderful platform that challenged the tiresome entrepreneurial hustle culture, and spread the message of rewriting the future of work and success for a better-balanced life. I can tell you I am ready for that myself. Social media is constantly trying to shove the hustle down our throats, right? If you relaunched the podcast portion of the Anti-Hustle Hustle Club tomorrow, who'd be the first guest you'd recruit?
Joe Welstead: I think it would be my friend Charles. He runs a multiple eight-figure brand in the supplement space, and he is a solo founder. He has one share, there's no investors, he's got 100% ownership. Every day he goes for a dog walk at three o'clock in the afternoon. He's got a family, he's got a little kid, he has time for his family. And he is a great inspiration to me. He's a good friend, and he's a great inspiration because the way he manages this, I think, is just by ignoring so much noise and focusing ruthlessly on his own stuff. He once referred to himself as a Russian negotiator when it comes to his own business, like managing suppliers and so on. That's how focused he is. So I love him for that.
Phillip Oakley: Ruthlessly. You know what's cool about that, too? There's so many things cool about that story, and you didn't mention the brand, but I'll ask you off air, because I'm curious about him and I want to go learn about him, too. "Focus ruthlessly." A lot of times we hear that and we think, he's on calls and he's taking deals every day and he's focused on stuff. But you can't do that outside of the boundaries you set. So if he's actually negotiating to make sure he has the most of his time, I'm jealous. I need to learn his ways.
Joe Welstead: I'm not saying it's easy, but he does a good job of it. It's cool to see.
Phillip Oakley: Yeah, anything worth doing isn't easy, right? When you were swimming to represent Scotland in the mid-2010s, did you have any pre-meet hype music, or a favorite song that settled your nerves?
Joe Welstead: I did. I went through a phase of super crazy techno music. But then what actually worked super, super well, and it took me a while to work this out, was deeply emotional, inspirational, cinematic music. And the one that I used a lot was, remember the music in Gladiator? The Hans Zimmer song called "Now We Are Free"? It's just shivers, man.
Phillip Oakley: Yeah. Man, I've got goosebumps already, look at that.
Joe Welstead: The energy is just raising and raising and boiling up in your body. It's so good.
Phillip Oakley: So I'm a crier. I cry at movies. And I've seen Gladiator. It's definitely in my top three. It might be my favorite movie, for many, many scenes. But when they lift him up at the end and carry him out of the Colosseum, and his hand is going through the wheat and stuff? Niagara Falls. Every time.
Joe Welstead: Yeah. A hundred percent.
Phillip Oakley: All right, brands. The show's a lot about building brands, and that means a lot of different things, and there's a lot that happens behind the scenes that helps us build brands. So I love asking people about their favorite brands, just to hear the nuance when you put yourself in the customer's shoes and what's important to you. So what are three of your favorite brands? And if you can recall, how did you first find out about them, and when's the last time you bought?
Joe Welstead: I would first say I'm not a great consumer. It's one of these weird things when you're in the retail consumption business. You end up being almost outside of it. I obviously receive a lot of ads, but my mindset is critical of ads, or I'm inspired by ads, but I'm not in the consumer mindset most of the time. So I'm not a great consumer. But there are three brands I can think of.
Joe Welstead: I'll start with non-digital. There's an Italian clothing company called Boggi, B-O-G-G-I. Super high quality, and I would say quite honest pricing. And the reason I really like them is I went to their store in London, and there happened to be a person from their Italian HQ. I think his role is brand director, but he's the vibes officer, I'd call him. And he was so good at explaining to me what they were up to, what the brand was aspiring to be. He showed me all these different pieces and got me really excited about the brand. And I was like, this is cool. Usually I don't love going clothes shopping. I find it a bit stressful, and I end up sweating and feeling uncomfortable. This was so good. It was a really, really enjoyable experience. So Boggi's number one.
Joe Welstead: Number two. I've now been living in France again for the past two and a half years, and it's kind of my first time living here as an adult. I grew up here, but I left when I was 17. There's not a huge amount of really good DTC CPG brands here, I would say. Coming here after spending 15 years in the UK, I realized we're really good in the UK at this game. And I know the US is great at this game as well. But the UK, I would say, punches above its weight, because it's not a huge country, but the DTC and startup innovation game is really, really strong. So seeing some pop up in France is really nice. There's a brand called Horace, H-O-R-A-C-E. They're a men's grooming brand. They're bigger than I thought they were when I first came across them, but every product is a home run. Everything I've tried is fantastic, to the point that, because they're a French brand, a lot of their copy is a bit cheesy in English, because they try to be an international brand. Again, I'm quite critical of this stuff, so a lot of it feels like a bit of a miss to me, or they're just trying a bit too hard. But their products are so good that I completely forgive them for that. So that's quite cool.
Joe Welstead: And then a third one. These guys I found through Twitter. The founder and I follow each other, and we just swapped products. They're called Wyde Footwear, W-Y-D-E. They're a Swedish company. I've been wearing barefoot shoes for a long time, and I've been a Vivobarefoot customer for years. I love their shoes, but they honestly don't look that great. If you want to wear a pair of Vivos with jeans, it just doesn't look great. And Wyde's a really cool brand, because they have really nice wide-toe-box shoes, barefoot style, but they actually look like cool sneakers. So I've really been enjoying that.
Phillip Oakley: Nice, that's awesome. I'll have to check those out. I want to go back to Horace for a second, though. Did you share that recently on Instagram? A hair product, a little white tub?
Joe Welstead: I think I did, yeah. That was another one. I've recently switched from them to [brand name unclear on recording]. That's another Swedish company, I think. Definitely Nordic. Fantastic products. Absolutely brilliant.
Phillip Oakley: That's why. Yeah, that's right. Nice. So the international copy thing is really interesting, and I think we're going to get into that soon, actually, because you have lived in so many places. And I think you know this: I've only lived in the United States. So I try to be careful with the lens I put on the rest of the world, and try to understand how the things we do and say appear to other people or come off. We'll stay out of politics and news. We don't even have to ring that part up, right? But products, how to promote a product on the other side of the planet when you haven't been there and you haven't sat in the culture, you haven't done the ethnography… You have such a lens for different cultures, and that's probably actually helped remove that consumer lens for you some, as well, right? Go ahead.
Joe Welstead: Well, I consider it a strength for me, but I'm also very aware that it gives me some very obvious blind spots. There are some angles that I don't see, and I'm very aware of this. For example, our main market for Oshun is the UK. I'm really not very good with UK pop culture. Pop culture is just not my thing, because I didn't grow up in the country. I consider myself British, but I don't have that '90s, 2000s British pop culture. So I'm very aware that that's a big blind spot for me. I have other strengths, but playing the pop culture card is not one of them.
Phillip Oakley: Can I give you a huge compliment, though? I think it's why your products stand out in the thumb scroll. First of all, you're a smart marketer, you're a smart entrepreneur, you do have style, but it's not "I have to fit in this group to look a certain way and have that style." You have your own style. And that comes across in the photography you guys share. It comes across in the product selection, the bottles. I do have my Oshun here, for the audience. I need to clean it. I didn't see that till it was on camera. It's probably salt. But I think the wider lenses that you've gained, and being aware that you don't know what you don't know, that awareness allows you to make something that's special. And that really does come across.
Joe Welstead: It's really freeing. Yeah. Thanks.
The Meat Lanes, Continents, and Cultures
Phillip Oakley: So let's get into the meat. We're going to talk more about lanes, continents, and cultures. Let's start at the beginning. You were born in Scotland, with a Scottish dad and an American mum, moved to France when you were one, is that right? And grew up there, gap year in Australia, back in France, university. When someone asks you where you're from, what do you say?
Joe Welstead: All my life, this has been a hard question to answer. This is where I'm from, but here I was always the Scottish kid. And then I went to study in Scotland, and there I was the French kid. So that's just the reality you have to live with when you've moved countries.
Phillip Oakley: Sure. Maybe six months ago, maybe a year ago, you taught me a phrase from Australia that I've used numerous times, and I've credited you many times. And it's "don't piss in my pocket." So I want to hear a little bit more about Australia, too. Will you tell the audience what "don't piss in my pocket" means?
Joe Welstead: Obviously I had no idea what it meant when I first heard it. It was my swimming coach in Australia who said that to me. And it basically means, don't compliment me for nothing. Don't give me bullshit compliments.
Phillip Oakley: Very useful. Unfortunately, I like people so much, it comes across that way a lot, so…
Joe Welstead: It's probably something also about Americans.
Phillip Oakley: Yeah, absolutely. Well, unfortunately, I'm a hundred percent that. So what else did you pick up in Australia? And were you the Scottish kid in Australia? Were you the French kid in Australia?
Joe Welstead: I think I was just the weird European kid.
Phillip Oakley: Awesome. That's very cool.
Joe Welstead: But being there was actually kind of nice, because of course there's true Aussies, but most of that year I was in Perth. It's quite a remote city. And just by its nature, there were a lot of Singaporeans, there was a mix of people. There were some people who were born and raised there who considered themselves Welsh, because there was quite a big Welsh community there. But they had nothing Welsh about them, except that they considered themselves Welsh. So that kind of felt familiar in a way. It was just a bit of a melting pot.
Phillip Oakley: It is so interesting. Why the Welsh?
Joe Welstead: I don't know. But I imagine if you go to Boston, there's a lot of Irish, right? I imagine it's a little bit like that, where it's generations and generations down, but people still consider themselves Irish.
Phillip Oakley: Makes sense. So let's pick up on the culture stuff from different continents and different countries. Growing up between Scottish, American, and French influences, what have you noticed is the same about people everywhere? And what's completely different? Do you see anything that's consistent, or are there definite pockets of things that you've become aware of, especially when it comes to work, health, and work-life balance?
Joe Welstead: I mean, the work-life balance is a huge thing. I would say the extremes would be between the French and the Americans. But I think deep down, everybody sort of wants the same thing. We just have different volumes for communicating it. The British volume is the lowest. This is what shocked me when I went to university in Scotland, after essentially growing up as a French kid. Although we spoke English at home, my whole social life was with French people. People here are very direct. And so that's the only thing that I knew, right? And then I was plunged into Scotland, where people don't say what they feel, and so you have to work it out. There are so many layers of social rites and symbolism and metaphors and ways of communicating things that are buried under layers of language. And when you're unfamiliar with it, it's a bit of a shock. So you have to really learn that.
Joe Welstead: But I think, ultimately, we all want the same things. We just have completely different language to communicate that. And everybody's life tends to be guided by the language that they use. I think most people probably don't realize how much that affects them. I did this myself until recently. I considered myself a problem solver. And recently I realized that's not a very good way to look at things, because all I'm doing then is actually making the problem the hero. Whereas thinking of myself as a solution finder, or a solution creator, or an enabler, not even solution, just a future enabler, is much more freeing, because suddenly I'm only looking at what I want to achieve and what I want to do, rather than worrying about the negative. For every positive, there's a negative. For every negative, there's a positive. So if you just focus on what you want to do and what you want to achieve, without thinking, is it good or bad, you forget about the bad, because it's just life. And that's my personal way of weaving through these things, I guess. I think we're all focused on similar-ish outcomes. We just have very different ways of communicating them and using language to describe them.
Phillip Oakley: Nice. Joe, that's really wise. Rory Sutherland, and I'm going to mess up the quote, of course, but he says the opposite of a good idea could be another good idea. And when you're focused on just a problem, as you said, the problem is the hero, and so it's done, as opposed to looking for different solutions that could be the right fit. That's a really smart place to put your energy. And that explains a lot of some of the cool things you've created, too. Did growing up in France influence your feelings about hustle culture?
Joe Welstead: I'm sure. A hundred percent. And also, I've come back here after 15 years or more of being abroad, in different countries. And some of my friends here have been incredibly successful, but I have a lot of friends who have regular jobs. And jobs here don't necessarily pay that well. And I love hanging out with these people, because it's a really good reminder that, yeah, they don't have a lot of money, but when they leave their work, they're completely free. They don't worry about any of that. And hanging out with them in that environment is so nice, because you can talk about anything. The whole point is to not be worried about work or money or anything like that, because that part is done. And now let's just focus on enjoying ourselves and having a good time.
Phillip Oakley: I love it. I have purposefully sought more of that. We have several friends who are university professors, and it's so nice to sit down and not just have regular conversation, but they don't ask us about advertising, they don't ask us about marketing, they don't ask us about the business. We talk about life and culture and all the things. It's really nice.
Joe Welstead: Well, a lot of people here don't even know what I do. And I really enjoy not telling people. It's great. It's my own perception, right, it might be total bullshit, but my perception is that it gives me a bit of a mystique and an aura. They don't understand what I do. Also, my wife is a full-time mom, and that's quite rare here. So again, I feel like that just gives a little bit of mystique, which I enjoy. It makes me feel good. So I don't talk about work, and then they don't ask me about it, and it's great.
Phillip Oakley: That's awesome. I did not know that the full-time mom thing was uncommon. That's really interesting.
Joe Welstead: The median income where I live is really quite low, and it's just really difficult for people who are employees to live off one salary.
Phillip Oakley: Got it. Yeah, that makes sense. So working in France, you actually worked with your parents for a while, I think after Australia, but before university, right? How did that shape your entrepreneurial journey?
Joe Welstead: The first thing is, I grew up with my parents always being independent workers, I guess. My dad was a textile consultant his whole career. When I was young, my mom didn't work. I have three siblings, so there were four of us at home. And then, when I was maybe around 10, they started a company together. It was called Hidden Cabin. And they did beautiful homeware items, leather goods and cushions and throws and things like that, and a little bit of clothing as well. Really beautiful stuff. I think they had some success, but if they had launched that company just 10 years later, and really dominated the early e-com space, they would have had an amazing runaway success with it.
Joe Welstead: But I had a great experience, because I got to experience a lot of the different parts of the business. I did trade shows, spoke to clients that I had no business speaking to as an 18-year-old. I could basically speak with way more confidence than an 18-year-old should have, probably more than I have now. That's the confidence of youth, right? So I got away with it. And that was awesome. I also did really, really manual stuff. They sold leather poufs, and we would stuff them. You'd put the top in first, because you'd fill it from the bottom. The top would be, I think, horsehair, and then you'd stuff the bulk with hay. The horsehair would make it really nice and smooth under the leather, so it felt really comfortable. So I did really manual stuff as well, and stock keeping and things like that.
Joe Welstead: But I think what really helped me later on was seeing that my parents are essentially two designers, two creators. So they were able to create beautiful products. But I think what was maybe missing in that system was, in any business, if you put two creatives together, the energy can get pushed too far into the creation and not enough into the focus.
Phillip Oakley: Sure. The operator versus the visionary. By the way, I haven't seen your mom, but I've seen your dad. Your dad's quite stylish and has his cool social media vibe going, so I'd like to have a pint with your dad.
Joe Welstead: He's a cool guy. Both my parents are very cool. Unfortunately, a lot of my friends say that they're cooler than me, which hurts a little bit, but they're probably right.
Phillip Oakley: No, it's something to aspire to. You get to turn that around to your kids, too.
Joe Welstead: Right, exactly.
Phillip Oakley: Did they just have retail? Were they selling to larger retail outlets? Did they have a catalog? How was the business model set up?
Joe Welstead: It was based on the traditional B2B model, I would say. They did have a little bit of e-com, but they did not have the knowledge to really crack that, which was unfortunate, because if I had been older and had a little bit of knowledge on this stuff, I probably would have been able to really make a difference. But it was too early for me. The B2B stuff was essentially selling into high-end retail, like furniture and clothing retailers.
Phillip Oakley: Very cool. So when you went to university at Stirling, that sounds like quite the experience, especially having the coach put the pressure on you very early about making the Commonwealth Games. I can't imagine what went through your mind when he put that pressure on you. I think you said you were up at 5am for several years in a row, that kind of thing. How did that shape where you were, and how did it prepare you for future business?
Joe Welstead: It was probably the most helpful thing anybody could have done for me at that point. When I got to Stirling, the first six months to a year, in particular the first six months, were really difficult. I was probably really depressed at this point, on so many levels. I was expected to be in the elite training team. That's what I had understood when I went there. But then I got there, and they didn't take me on that team. I was always an easy student, I would say, in the sense that growing up and going to school in France, I could get pretty good grades without working too hard, which allowed me to spend time on my sport, right? But I had never done it in English. And obviously university is different. And I got it completely wrong. I was focused on all the wrong things for the first term. So I was having a hard time there. I had never had bad grades before. Suddenly I'm getting bad grades. I'm not in the team. And also, I can't understand half the people, and I'm expected to be Scottish. So I was like, holy shit, this sucks. This is so hard.
Phillip Oakley: Wow, yeah, no kidding.
Joe Welstead: And also, this was 2009. Growing up, I was in a pretty privileged position, in the sense that money was never really an issue in my family. My dad did really well as a consultant, but around the 2007, 2008 crash, design consultancy work was one of the first things to just get cut from budgets. So his work really dried up at the exact time that I went to university. At the same time, the exchange rate between euros and pounds went crazy. So essentially the money that we agreed he would give me monthly was just not enough. So I was broke as shit, couldn't understand anyone, didn't make the team, and was getting shit grades. And it was dark all the time. So I was like, my God, what have I done? This sucks so bad.
Joe Welstead: I didn't really have a good first season. But by the end of that year, it was June 2010 or something, and there were Commonwealth Games trials for Team Scotland. So I competed in the trials. I wasn't really aware of what the Commonwealth Games were at this point, because I'd had a French upbringing for the most part, so the Commonwealth Games was not really a thing for me. This is when I really discovered how important it was for people. And I went to the trials, and my coach, Carrie, after I'd finished my racing, she was like, you know, if you are serious, you can be on this team in four years, and in four years, it's going to be here in Glasgow. And that's when something switched in my head. And it was so helpful, because having somebody external, an experienced and wise third party, tell you something that is probably achievable that you hadn't really considered before gives you that good level of, that feels uncomfortable, but maybe I have a shot.
Joe Welstead: So that gave me that far-away carrot. Something switched in my head. The first year, I skipped loads of morning sessions, because I was just like, I'm tired, I can't be bothered, what's the point? I was just not in the right place.
Phillip Oakley: Well, you're a student, too.
Joe Welstead: But then the second year, everything became so simple. Obviously it was not easy, but it was beautifully simple. My alarm would go off, I would get up. I would stand up before turning it off. Things like this. Everything was just, okay, boom, boom, boom, let's just execute. I'm probably not the best swimmer in the world, but I'm going to outwork everyone and see how far I can go. That was my attitude.
Phillip Oakley: Nice. For the listeners, will you explain what the Commonwealth Games are?
Joe Welstead: Yeah. Take the Olympic Games, same idea. But it's essentially all the countries that were part of the Commonwealth coming together and competing across a bunch of different sports. You've got Canada, for example, you've got Australia, you've got every single nation of the United Kingdom. So it's not a British team. It's Scotland against Wales, against Ireland, against England. It's one of the few events where British athletes can compete for their home nation, like for Scotland. It depends on the sport, but in swimming, if you went to the World Championships, European Championships, or the Olympics, you'd compete for Great Britain. You wouldn't compete for your home nation. So it was really special for a lot of people. Even Olympic athletes, and the Olympics are a higher level, felt like it was something special, because you could represent your home country.
Phillip Oakley: That's really cool. For the American listeners, it's not the same, mind you, because we're talking about a global event, but there's still 50 states in the United States, and there's very different cultures in North Carolina than Texas and Washington and Michigan. It would be neat to have something like that. So tell me a little bit about being a pro swimmer. Was the focus of pro swimming the Commonwealth Games?
Joe Welstead: Yeah, it was. In Scotland, nobody was really a pro swimmer. But the way it became a thing for me was my old swim coach in France put me in touch with one of the clubs a couple of hours away from where I grew up, which had a pro team. He put me in touch with the head coach there, and it was probably my second year at university, and they basically took me on. So I would go back and forth for all the major events in France, and I would represent that club racing in France, which was really, really fun, because we had an awesome team. Absolute killers. And being part of that was just a really different experience to everything in Scotland and the UK.
Joe Welstead: Sport is quite different in France. It's more accessible for a lot of people. So you end up having a very varied culture and team profile, I guess. This is something that shocked me when I got to Scotland. You basically had to pay for everything. If you go away for a competition, you have to pay for your entries for each race, your hotel, your travel, all these things. That was never the case here, even at my local club. Even as a beginner competitive swimmer, you just pay your annual fee to be part of the club. And through subsidies, through fees, through maybe club sponsorship, the club covers everything. The club takes you to competitions, covers training, covers hotel, travel, entry fees, everything. So it's a more social system, I guess, where you end up having very different personalities, and it's so fun. It's really cool.
Phillip Oakley: Did you have people from different countries as well? Was it a melting pot for your team?
Joe Welstead: A little bit. There was an English girl on the team, but most people were French. We had a couple of people from Guadeloupe, for example, and that was cool, because again, just a very different culture. So it was cool to be able to hang out with these people, and everybody was so hungry and so supportive. We were just killers. It was great to be a part of that. There was just so much energy.
Phillip Oakley: It's really nice to be on a team full of killers. And there's no doubt that gave you that go-attack, leave-the-cave-and-slay-a-dragon attitude. Moving into being an entrepreneur, moving back to the UK and starting your company, is there anything you had to unlearn from that killer hustle attitude to start Motion?
Joe Welstead: I think the thing about any kind of elite sport is that you feel satisfied when you've physically exhausted yourself. That's a very satisfying feeling when you're in a hard training period. So you do have to uncouple that from work, because it's just not really possible to do that every day through essentially deskbound work. So it is different. But I think the really helpful thing from swimming was that experience of having quite a long-term target and goal, and then giving yourself bite-size little hurdles to pass, so you'd feel successful maybe on a week-by-week or month-by-month basis, but you still had that big target at the end. So I suppose it's delayed gratification, and the knowledge that you're moving the needle every day a little bit. But you're not going to feel like you've won every day.
Joe Welstead: I think, maybe it's less the case now, but there has been this idea that a founder's life is super exciting and fun, and every day's different. My view is, you're actually doing the same shit every day. It's work. Your job is basically to do the same stuff, get in front of more people every day, and tell them the same story over and over again. So it is quite boring. But that experience of having gone through that grind, I suppose, is really helpful. You have that delayed gratification and that sense of satisfaction just from your work, while having a big target at the end.
Phillip Oakley: No, I can relate to that, too. There are times when I'm trying to solve some sticky problem, or unwind some metaphorical ball of bullshit that isn't ready to be unwound. And I find if I just put it to the side and do something creative for a little while, even if it doesn't pay as much or it's not as big a problem, it helps me feel like I've accomplished something. So training, right? I'm going to use the soccer metaphor, or the football metaphor, because that's my sport. My touch is shit, but I can go sprint. I can go really push myself really hard and feel like I've done something, at least to unwind that mental problem. And going back to work, it really helps to get away from those problems that aren't ready to be solved and do something. Or it really does become, you feel like you're just stuck doing the same shit every day, and that is just a grind, man. It'll wear you down.
Phillip Oakley: So talk to me about starting Motion Nutrition. You mentioned there weren't a lot of high-quality supplements out there. But on top of that, I think I read somewhere that you looked around, and it felt like, as long as people were putting a supplement in their body, they thought the job was done. They didn't necessarily feel like they were getting something out of it.
Joe Welstead: Yeah, I mean, this was a long time ago now. We basically worked on it in 2015 and launched it at the start of 2016. So the landscape has changed a lot. There's a lot more high-quality products now. But back then, there was this interesting shift, where especially protein powder, around 2015, went from the reserve of athletes and bodybuilders to every single person on earth taking some kind of protein supplement. And it was the same product. Nothing had changed. And I thought, well, this is a bit weird, because as an athlete, the ends that you go to are way beyond regular life. You would eat shit if you had to. It doesn't matter if something tastes really bad, or if it's really gut-disruptive. If it's going to help with your performance, you're probably going to take it.
Joe Welstead: A very silly example might be that a lot of people use caffeine before races, but you might have a race at 8pm. And I knew guys who took one gram of caffeine half an hour before a race. Now, obviously, you're not going to sleep that night. Just forget about it. That's just an example of how the athlete mindset is completely different, because your whole life is centered around your performance. That's not the reality for most grown-ups. That's just not life, right? And we saw essentially the same products being marketed to everyday consumers. And I thought, this just doesn't make any sense. Why would we sell the same product to somebody whose life is completely different from a full-time athlete or a bodybuilder? So that was basically the premise. And we thought, well, let's see if it's possible to make a really, really healthy line of supplements that are going to help people, regardless of how they consider themselves as an athlete. It wasn't really about performance. It was just about feeling good, and feeling like you're nourishing yourself properly.
Joe Welstead: It was a solid brand. We had a very good product mix, and we got some really good results from it. I ran it for six years, and we sold it in 2022. The product mix changed a little bit. We realized, again, I don't think we had taken it far enough away from the athlete mindset. We had a really good range of products. We had organic protein powders. We had a creatine supplement, which I now know was way too early to the market. It was a really good creatine product. We called it Brain and Body Creatine, because we had a few extra ingredients in there that would help with your mental performance. And it was so good. If that product had launched in 2024 or 2025, it would have been massive on its own. But in 2016, people just didn't really know about it, or there was too much education to do.
Joe Welstead: But eventually we realized, for the most part, if we're talking to everyday consumers, their biggest problem is stress and sleep and feeling overworked, burnt out. The mental burden of a stressful life. So that's what we pivoted to focusing on. And we had a product called Unplug that was essentially a nighttime nootropic. I think we were really the first to take this concept of nootropics and split it between daytime and nighttime. Unplug was a mix of magnesium, some amino acids, and some botanical extracts that would help your nervous system calm down and help you sleep better. And then we had a product called Power Up that was the morning equivalent. No caffeine, no stimulants, but a load of B vitamins and some botanical extracts that would help you have mental clarity, help with your memory, help with stress management, this kind of thing. Those two products really, really took off very well.
Phillip Oakley: Nice. Man, hearing you explain them, you were very early. I didn't even think about those things until they were shoved under my nose after the pandemic, for the most part on Meta ads, right? But you were early to that stuff, and also successfully marketed that stuff. Where did you find the inspiration for these supplements that were going to help you perform better? Was that just something athletes knew about, and we mere mortals had yet to discover until it was gifted to us?
Joe Welstead: I think now athletes know about it. There's a lot more education around supplements now. My experience was a little bit different. I was basically under the guidance of Team Scotland from 2011 to 2014. When I started in 2009, I was nowhere near. I didn't get the funding, I didn't get the support, right? I had to work my way up to that. But then from the following year onwards, I got strength and conditioning coaching, I got performance coaching, a performance psychologist, I think they called it. We had a doctor, we had a physiotherapist, so I had one or two physio sessions a week. I had really, really good support. But in the supplement space, that was a bit taboo. The stance of the governing body at that time was, we're just going to ignore that stuff and not talk about it. It's not under our remit. I imagine that's changed now. But at the time, they just did not help with that.
Joe Welstead: So my mindset was, cool, well, if you're not going to help, I'm going to research the shit out of it and make my own stack, essentially. So I basically spent three or four years trying every single product that I could find. I ordered stuff from Australia, from the US, from Canada. I was probably the first ever UK customer of Vega Sport, a Canadian brand. They became huge, right? But in 2010, I think they were just a Canadian home brand. Maybe they were in the US already, I don't know. But they didn't exist in the UK, and I imported it, and I thought, this stuff is really good. So I tried all sorts of stuff. I even took probiotic supplements back then, which was just completely unheard of at that time. But that basically gave me years of research for then launching my own line of products.
Phillip Oakley: That makes a lot of sense. You were also trying to figure out how to dial yourself in at the same time, which is great. I'm going to bounce around for a tad here. I took shitty protein powder in the '90s and 2000s, and it was awful. As a matter of fact, I reached a point where I was like, I'm going to make this taste good no matter what, and I stuffed bananas and vanilla ice cream into a vanilla shake. Now, mind you, it still tasted like dirt. Garbage. And I won't name the brand, but they're still on the shelf now. But I reached a point where I couldn't eat a banana for 10 years. It made me so sick, and it was so nasty.
Joe Welstead: Really?
Phillip Oakley: There was no one to really guide you. You could go into GNC, which is a big retailer here, and they would guide you, but the best stuff on the shelf they told you to get was just hot garbage. So I appreciate that you explored to find what really worked for you and recognized great products. But you said something else that was really interesting: the performance psychologist. The mindset is so important, to get up and stand and listen to your damn alarm for 30 more seconds before you get up. Can you talk about the experience you went through with that psychologist, and maybe how that's helped you with business later on, when challenges come up?
Joe Welstead: Yeah. The biggest thing was not so much managing the grind. It was basically being in control when it comes down to your actual performance, and being able to deliver your best performance at the moment that it mattered. There's a lot of things that I really learned, and I really appreciate having had that support. I'll take you through one thing, if you want, that really stuck with me.
Phillip Oakley: Please do.
Joe Welstead: I'm going to try and do this justice, because I haven't thought about it in a while. If you imagine a dartboard, the bullseye in the middle is you being cool, calm, and collected. You're completely in control of your actions, you're focused on yourself, you're relaxed. At this point, you're going to deliver your best performance, right? Then you've got the first circle around that. The first circle is basically noticing what's going on around you. In swimming, for example, you might be at a new pool that you've never been to before, or racing swimmers you haven't raced against before, and you just notice that they're there. No worries. It's quite easy to just notice this stuff and then come back to the bullseye, where you're cool, calm, and collected.
Joe Welstead: But it's also very easy to get from the first to the second circle. And the second circle is where you start comparing yourself to your current surroundings, to what you're familiar with. It might be something like, that guy's warm-up is different. No further than that, right? That's weird, I've never seen that before. This is very common if you go for a job interview, for example. At this point, you might think, people are dressed really well here, or the lighting is very grand here, look, they've got live flowers in this building. So you're comparing at this point.
Joe Welstead: And then the next circle out is where you start to have a little bit of self-doubt. You're still comparing this stuff, but you're now questioning your worth compared to the stuff that you're seeing around you. It might be the people, it might be the environment, it might be the time of day, it could be all kinds of things. So this might be, I wonder if I should change my warm-up, because that guy is better than me, and his warm-up is completely different to mine. That's starting to get really dangerous. The further out you go from the bullseye, the harder it is to get back to the middle.
Joe Welstead: And then the final circle is basically where you start really questioning everything. And the very common question that anybody would ask at this point is, what am I even doing here? That's a really dangerous position to be in, because if you start asking that question, you're pretty screwed. The mental effort to go back to the middle, where you're cool, calm, and collected, is so difficult. So this is a really helpful framework, because once you're aware of these stages, it's a lot easier to come back. If you're unaware, you can go from the middle out to the outer ring in a flash, right? But if you're aware of your mind escalating and going further and further out, it's really easy to come back in.
Phillip Oakley: That's fantastic. And reminding yourself that you can always come back to the center. Nice.
Joe Welstead: Right. Even when you're aware of it, it's actually quite fun to do these things. It's quite fun to go, let me have a little peek, let me think about this. Where am I? This is different. But if you go from, this is different, to, okay, now this is exciting, so now let's get back to me, because I now get to perform in this arena, right? That's cool.
Phillip Oakley: So you're microdosing the stress, and you know that you can come back down. That's great, man. Obviously this will make the show notes, but we'll make sure this is in the PO Notes, too, because that's really great. There's a lot of people, especially in the creative fields, in all of marketing, even entrepreneurs who are involved in their own marketing, who just go through layers of, my God, I'm not good enough. Quote, "what am I doing here?" Even at 50, I still ask myself that once a week. So I'm going to have to sketch out Joe's dartboard and put it beside my monitor. That's going to help.
Outworking Everyone, Then Opting Out Phillip Oakley: All right, let me back up a second. Sorry, I got lost in the dartboard, which I loved, by the way. Thank you. So after that success as a pro athlete, and moving into being an entrepreneur, at what point did "outwork the competition" become something you knew you could do, but you were focused on creating a better life for yourself? So instead of outworking everyone, there's also choosing when to opt out.
Joe Welstead: So this is interesting. This really comes down to a definition of what work means. For the most part, most people are going to think that working hard is working for a long time. I don't think that's true, especially if your job is anything remotely creative. We all know that our creative insights come when we're away from our desk. You might be going for a walk, you might be having a shower, you might just be lying in bed trying to fall asleep. That's when these things come in, right? So harnessing that moment, maybe writing it down or whatever, is what's going to give you the big breakthrough.
Joe Welstead: So I consider myself somebody who works hard, but not for a long time. And having kids has probably enhanced this, where I can't even afford to go over time now. It switched from, I know that come six or seven p.m., my brain is mush and there's no point in me doing anything anymore, to: five p.m., the kids are home. I can squeeze another hour in, but six p.m. is a hard stop. That's it. I cannot afford to do more, right? So in a way, it's quite liberating, where it's like, I just need to get this shit done. So that's the work hard part, I guess. I'm not messing around. I'm getting what I need to do and getting it done, knowing very well that the time I'm away from my desk is probably when, at the back of my head, I'm going to find solutions to the really important stuff. So I don't worry about not spending that much time at my desk. Honestly, I probably spend a maximum of 35 hours a week at my desk. And I think for a lot of Americans, that's going to seem like half of what I should be doing. I can't speak for anybody else. I can only speak for my truth. But there's no world where I would get more done in those extra hours. I would get the same amount done, and I would just feel shit about it, because it's taking me twice as long and I've basically doom-scrolled. I've just not been effective.
Phillip Oakley: Yeah, it's easy to convince ourselves we're being productive if we're banging at the keyboard and producing something, right? It doesn't mean it's actually solving the problem, or the best work that can be done. I'm a big fan of getting the input in your noggin and taking that walk. Or hell, go wash the dishes, take a shower. That's when it seems like the problems start to unwind themselves. It sounds like a lot of it's not just letting go. The discipline is also really important. And going back to your dartboard, it's easy to start getting dragged to the edge of that dartboard, and bringing yourself back to center says, no, it's time to step away from the desk and go have dinner with the kids, and I know the problem will be there when I get back. So is that when the Anti-Hustle Hustle Club came up? It was more than a podcast, right?
Joe Welstead: It was primarily a podcast. We had a little bit of merch as well. I can't remember now exactly what the idea was or how it came about, but this was pre-COVID, so I think we maybe started it in 2018. I don't remember exactly now. But there was so much noise around the hustle and the grind. It was so toxic. And I just felt like somebody needs to talk about the other way of doing things, because I'm hearing a lot about this grind and hustle, and then I see who around me is very successful, and I'm like, that's not how they live their life. Or if it is, I don't aspire to that at all. So yeah, it was a really fun thing to do. Really fun. And I got to speak to some very cool people.
Phillip Oakley: It looked fun. The Instagram is still live, so I was able to go find some old posts, and people really loved it. People really needed that in their lives. They needed someone to tell them that not being in Inc. magazine didn't reduce their worth.
Joe Welstead: Yeah. It's probably now an even better time to do it. I can't do it just now, but I think there's probably an even bigger need for it today than there was eight years ago.
Phillip Oakley: Yeah, that's a good shout. I agree with you. So a couple of years ago, you were still in beautiful Brighton, gorgeous place, right? And you decided to move back to France, and about the same time, you launched Oshun.
Joe Welstead: Yeah, within about two weeks. I think we launched on the 30th of March, 2024, and we got to France on the 14th of April. It was a crazy time. And just to add to that, we got to France and we didn't have a house. We had nothing planned, really. We just decided to move. So there were a lot of moving parts. And my wife was pregnant with number two. So it was a crazy year, man. Absolutely crazy, crazy year.
Phillip Oakley: This was your second CPG brand. You had multiple products at Motion, but this was the second big launch. I know you had some other projects going on in between. I think I can quote you: the second time around feels like having superpowers. I guess building on all the cheat codes.
Joe Welstead: Yeah, cheat codes. Cheat codes, for sure.
Phillip Oakley: Tell us what's on your cheat code list and what's on your not-to-do list.
Joe Welstead: Inevitably, you make some decisions and you commit to some stuff that doesn't go well. That doesn't mean it's going to be the same thing every single time, but you do start to get a sense for what works and what doesn't. Okay, here's something more tangible. With Motion, we launched from the very start as an omnichannel brand. We first launched with a retailer called Planet Organic. Then we did our first trade show about six months later. And the Whole Foods buyer, we were like, we need to find Belinda. Belinda's the buyer for this category. We need to find her, and we need to meet her, and we need to tell her all about this stuff. She came onto our stand, and I'm not kidding, these are the first words she said to us: "I saw you guys in Planet Organic. Why didn't you come to us first?"
Phillip Oakley: What?
Joe Welstead: I was like, holy shit. I thought I was the one chasing you.
Phillip Oakley: That's cool, man.
Joe Welstead: Yeah, it was cool. But that omnichannel strategy from day one probably stretched us too thin. And I think what a lot of people don't necessarily realize, maybe the first time anyway, is that especially if your retailers are selling online, you're just cannibalizing your audience. And essentially the only winners are Meta and Google, and maybe Amazon. But Meta and Google are the big winners, because everybody is going to be bidding for the same clicks, and that's just going to push the prices up. At some point, when you have the scale and a huge marketing flywheel, that's cool. It doesn't really matter, because what you want is to shift as much volume as possible, and where your customers buy is not all that relevant, because you've got that critical mass and you're good either way.
Joe Welstead: But in the early days, unless you raise millions and millions of dollars, you need that contribution margin to come back. So you're hit with two things at the same time. You're hit with the fact that your advertising costs are going to go up, because your retail partners are bidding for the same clicks. But also, your margin has been eroded, because let's just say you were going to sell a thousand units in your first month. That's how many you were going to sell regardless. If you were selling all of those direct, maybe you got 60, 70, 80% margin on that. But if you're now selling even 40% of them through a retail partner, your total contribution margin as a percentage is going to reduce, and your cash margin is going to reduce. So your advertising costs have gone up and your contribution margin has gone down, which is a really hard thing to manage when you're just starting off.
Phillip Oakley: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Man, that's a good shout about omnichannel, because that's a lot of levers to pull out of the gates. You need money to do that. But when you started Oshun, you bootstrapped, you went with one hero product, you didn't try to line the shelves or get multiple facings in different retailers, and you were profitable from month one. Obviously that was a conscious decision, but can you unpack the strategy a little bit for us, and how you rolled that out?
Joe Welstead: Yeah. The first thing is, I don't want to say that we had all the solutions. We were well informed, and we were making some decisions based on some data and some guts. Let's break it down into parts. In the first couple of months, even before we launched, we would do things like little surveys on LinkedIn and over email. And it wasn't so much about the answers. It was just about whether people would take a couple of minutes to fill it in. With just your organic reach, having 300 people take a couple of minutes to fill in a survey is quite meaningful, because that shows intent, or that shows interest, more than whatever the answers are. So that was the first sort of answer.
Phillip Oakley: I love that, Joe. Sorry to interrupt you. I just love that, because there's so many people who want a sure thing, and they're chasing an answer they think is going to confirm. A lot of founders do this. They have an idea, they go chase confirmation of that idea, as opposed to being curious and listening to the organic nature of what's coming in. Apologies for interrupting you.
Joe Welstead: It's all good. We did that a couple of times. It was helpful to get the data back. More than anything, it was reassuring to see that there was interest. Then we launched with a very small amount of stock. And the second question was, okay, we've got interest and maybe some intent, but are people actually going to buy? Are people going to part with their money for this product? That was answered very positively, very quickly. So then we committed more money to inventory. But for those first months post-launch, we didn't run a single ad. April, May, June, and then I think we started very slowly in July. So let's say three and a half months where we didn't run any ads. And of course, when you don't run ads, scale is fairly limited. But we got to twenty thousand pounds a month in revenue just by talking a lot.
Phillip Oakley: Wow. That's great.
Joe Welstead: Okay, maybe flexing the network that we'd built over the previous 10 years as well, especially health practitioners and nutritional therapists. Getting their endorsements was really helpful. But the most important thing was speaking to as many people as possible, directly, online, broadcasting, everything we could possibly do. And that informed us of two things. One was, what type of person is actually going to listen to us? What type of person is going to be interested in this? And two, what do we need to say or not say to get them to buy, essentially? What language do we need to use? What is relevant to them? It's not that it was in a fancy data spreadsheet or data room, but we did it for those three months, so it was in our heads. And having that in our heads before launching ads was so helpful. Okay, now we're going to put money into this, and we know who we need to talk to, and we know what to say. So the ads worked from day one, which was so awesome.
Joe Welstead: I always say, if you want to grow a business, you basically have two big levers. One is time, and one is money. So we did it with time. We spent those first, let's call it four months, of relatively slow growth to then inform our ad campaigns so that they would be successful. If we hadn't taken those four months, we could have maybe done it in one month, but we probably would have wasted a lot of ad money. Wasted is maybe the wrong word, because then you've saved your three-month window, but you would have essentially handed over a lot of money to Meta.
Phillip Oakley: Yeah, but you also took the time to line up the right messaging with the product. I've been around some medtech, and you and I have talked about some healthcare stuff. There are so many investor-backed products where the investors weren't willing to wait for the time to not only dial in the messaging, but dial in the product, to make sure that it lined up with what the market was ready to, in your words, part ways with their money for. They said, no, it's go time, we're going to launch the campaign and pour the budget in. And six months later, there are mediocre results, because that connection wasn't ready yet when they launched.
Joe Welstead: Yeah. I think you can inform this stuff with ad money, but you're going to have to be comfortable with some ad concepts being total trash. Okay, that's trash, moving on. That's trash, moving on. I think the most common way of doing this is test, test, test, test, test, get the data, test, test, test, iterate, iterate, iterate. I find that process kind of lame. I find that process just a bit crap. Where's your commitment? Where are your guts? Pick a lane, man. And it's much easier to pick a lane and commit to something when you've had these conversations one-to-one with somebody, and you understand, this is the stuff that matters to you. Cool. Let's put money behind that.
Phillip Oakley: Thanks for the clip. Yes, man. It's not just the test, test, test, but also, because Meta's telling them to do 20, 30, 40, 100 creatives a week, it's hard to create that many fresh ideas. So they're just copying what everyone else is doing, which is just creating more confusion, even across categories, which customers don't care about. But find something and serve it to them enough where they start to recognize it and get curious about it. I love it. That's great advice.
Chaos Packaging & the Cost of Boring Phillip Oakley: Speaking of doing things differently, Michael Miraflor coined the term "chaos packaging" over on the Twitters, and then it blew up on LinkedIn. The Wall Street Journal covered it and gave other examples of chaos packaging. I'm using air quotes, for our audio listeners, like tampons in ice cream tubs, and sunscreen from a whipped cream can. But of course, Oshun's pump bottle, and I'll hold it up again for those on video. Now, mind you, this is the glass bottle. It's really beautiful. Well done, by the way. Beautiful packaging. It stands out. Before, it was a slightly narrower, I think taller, plastic bottle. And it was rudely made fun of, called a hand sanitizer bottle. But that's the whole point, right? How easy it is to actually dose out the product. You said that if you make something that isn't boring, everything else in marketing works better, and a boring product makes marketing more expensive. Can you talk about the idea of creating something new that had some friction, and leaning into it and making that special?
Joe Welstead: Yeah, a hundred percent. It's something I really, really, really believe in. But there are a lot of caveats. It's not so much that there are caveats, it's just that you have to be reasonable with it. You have to be sensible. The idea for the pump bottle was not to be chaotic. I had this idea that we needed it to be a very easy product to use. So the liquid format was the first thing. But then we tried different squeezy bottles and this kind of thing, and we thought, well, this just sucks, because you don't have an accurate measure. It's messy. This is not going to form a habit. The grounding and the mindset was, we need something that is, I mean, look at this, beautifully simple. It's a nice little habit to form a few times a day. That's what I wanted to get to.
Joe Welstead: The fact that it's a pump is a result of that thinking, not the other way around. We didn't make the pump to be provocative. We didn't choose that format to be provocative. We chose it because it's radically convenient. It's very precise. We dosed it just right, so you want four to eight pumps per day, depending on you as an individual and your activity and so on. And it happens that if you do that, a refill or a bottle is going to be a month's supply. So everything was just lining up perfectly. It's so user-friendly. And from a commercial perspective, it lends itself to a subscription business very, very well. So that was the thinking.
Joe Welstead: I do remember my two co-founders feeling a little bit uncomfortable about the idea. But to me, there's nothing provocative about this. Maybe it's what you touched on, where I'm not tainted by cultural expectations. It just makes sense. It's so enjoyable, it's beautiful to use, it's precise. What's provocative about that? There's no element that's provocative. It's very, very, very convenient. That was the thinking. I had no idea the response it would get. No idea.
Joe Welstead: And I remember when Michael Miraflor tweeted about it. We were two weeks old, man. It was within our first month. And we were next to multimillion-dollar businesses. He gave three or four brands in that original tweet where he coined the term, and Oshun was one of them. And I was like, there's no way we deserve to be in that position. That was my thinking at the time. Dude, we're this tiny little startup out of the UK. You're a venture capital observer, analyst person who the Wall Street Journal listens to.
Phillip Oakley: In Los Angeles. Yeah.
Joe Welstead: Right? Like, what is going on? All we did was put it in a pump bottle, because it's radically convenient, and suddenly it's chaos packaging. I understand now, but at the time, I was like, this is weird. To be honest with you, at that point it came in a box. The bottle was in a box, so the bottle wasn't even the packaging. To my mind, none of this made any sense. And I was probably a little bit vexed by it.
Joe Welstead: Now I'm super happy that it happened, and it did shape my view on future launches a little bit. But this is where the caveats are, because it needs to make sense. It cannot be a gimmick. It cannot be a gadget. Because then you might get that first wave of, whoa, what did they do? This is weird, this is different, this is chaos, blah, blah, blah. But if it's not convenient, if it doesn't add to the user experience, make it easier, make it more frictionless, make it a habit, it doesn't make any difference. You've just got a little bit of clickbait, but it's not improving the product in any way. So it cannot be a gimmick.
Phillip Oakley: Yeah, it won't have staying power. And again, for the listeners, this is why I called out some of the negative things that were said. The joke's on them, right? Because it was form follows function. You were really paying attention to how people use supplements, how they're going to apply it. Who listening to this who's used protein powder hasn't dumped protein powder all over the floor and the counter every time they've tried to make it, right? But it's clean, the dosage is right, it's convenient, it's beautiful. You don't mind seeing it, so it can be out where you can use it. By the way, I do have my magnesium, too. Just want to point that out. So it's not just the hydration electrolyte product. But it was paying attention to the user, not the gimmick. A few of the other things in the article, like the tampons in the ice cream tub, obviously I'm not the target audience, but I'm going to guess that won't stand the test of time. The sunscreen out of a whipped cream bottle, it's just an applicator. And I've thought about that one a little bit, too. How many times do we put sunscreen on, and it's so thick, and a little dollop is really hard to spread around? But if it's whipped and foamy and more spread out, that makes a lot more sense. I'm a huge fan of the pump, and I want to call out to people that it wasn't a gimmick. But there were also social triggers built into the product, too. Can you talk about that for a moment?
Joe Welstead: Right. Yeah, I mean, this is where boring is expensive. But boring being expensive is too abstract, so let's make it more precise. Having something that people are going to talk about is going to make your marketing cheaper. And again, let's make that even more tangible. Everybody who runs ads knows that if you get a bunch of comments and shares on your ad posts, the CPMs are going to go down, and the clicks are going to get cheaper. Some of it's going to be trash traffic, but you're getting a lot, a lot of awareness, because your community is engaging with your content. That's basically what happens here. And that's why I would want to have a social trigger of some kind in every product launch or every brand launch that I do, because you need something that's going to help you stand out, and not just be a victim of the overlords that control who sees what. Because we're basically all paying rent to Meta and Google, right? We don't have a physical store, but we're paying rent to get click-throughs instead of paying rent to get people through the doors. It's exactly the same thing.
Phillip Oakley: It's all rented land, man.
Joe Welstead: Except that, through your form and through your content… so this is where it differs. Your content can help, yes. That's one lever. But the form of your product, the design of your product, is something that you spend money on once, and it carries on for the entire lifetime of your business. So that's why it's so powerful to spend a lot of energy and time and focus on that design phase, because you can't change that easily. You can change your campaigns and your content very easily, but it's costly every time. Whereas that design piece, you do it once, and it's either going to cost you more money because nobody cares, or it's going to make things more effective because it gets attention.
Phillip Oakley: Yeah. So, again, for our trained marketers out there, Joe has now talked about three of the four Ps. We haven't got to price yet.
Joe Welstead: We can talk about price.
Phillip Oakley: So, social triggers. One of the other, I don't want to use the word "hack," because I just don't like the word "hack," but one of the other Trojan horses you used to get the product out there was to take your beautiful photography, which by the way you guys do in-house, and I'll give Jack some credit, and you snuck it into some places where it would be found organically. Can you talk about that?
Joe Welstead: Yeah. I don't know if they're used as much now, because of AI and generative images, but stock photography websites were really popular maybe five or six years ago, and continue to be for a while. I first found this out when I was still running Motion. I said, hey, Jack, I think you should start a profile on Unsplash, and maybe people will buy your images and you'll get money from it. I didn't believe in that. I just wanted him to have a profile on Unsplash and then sneak our product into the photography. It's just free product placement. We did it with Motion, and we've done it with Oshun on a couple of free stock imagery sites. The numbers are crazy. For the performance marketers, they're not going to like this, because you can't track what happens, right? So for them, it's entirely useless.
Phillip Oakley: They think they can track everything. They can't track everything.
Joe Welstead: But I remember, I haven't looked at the numbers in a while, there was one particular image that had one of our products next to a V60, basically freshly brewed coffee. That image was in the millions of views and in the hundreds of thousands of downloads. And the downloads is where it gets really interesting, because are they going in decks? What are they doing with these images? How many more views are happening from those hundreds of thousands of downloads? It's super cool. And it's completely untrackable. Maybe it's not changing anything, but it's a cool story anyway.
Phillip Oakley: It didn't cost you anything. That's the other thing. It's another opportunity for awareness. Once they see it one time, they can see it other places, and then your ads make more sense. Absolutely. I just think it's brilliant. Are there any other unconventional ways you've gotten your brands out into the world?
Influencers: Who's Really Getting Paid? Joe Welstead: Sure. We've had a few mega influencers post about our product. We never reach out to them directly. Essentially, what we do is we find somebody who's in their entourage, basically, and we just start seeding that person with our product. And if they like it, it'll pop up in conversation at some point. So that's how somebody like Trinny Woodall, if you're familiar with her, she was one of the original fashion and beauty influencers from the UK. Huge since the '90s, basically, with millions of followers online. Slightly older than your typical creator-influencer person. Very interesting audience for us.
Joe Welstead: This is maybe going to be helpful for people who are really into seeding, because I can give you an idea of scale here. We basically gave our product to her personal trainer, and the personal trainer gave her one of our bottles, and she posted about it in September of 2024. So we were a six-month-old company. Something like two and a half million followers, let's say. I don't know for sure. Most people will have no idea how much that can generate in sales, especially because the follower count is ultimately irrelevant. It's all down to who's actually seeing the content. She posted about us, I think, in her story and in a reel. And that day, we were doing very small numbers, but that day we probably did about ten thousand dollars more than normal. At that point, fantastic, a really, really solid bump in sales for us. But I think a lot of people would see two and a half million followers and go, that's worth so much money, let's pay a hundred grand for the content. If it's in isolation, and not part of a bigger marketing flywheel, you're not going to get your money back, I don't think.
Phillip Oakley: No. And this show's about you, it's not about me, but I have a funky opinion about that stuff, too. You don't have to agree with this, by the way. I'm going to make sure I say that out loud. But I've seen so many times where the influencer gets paid, the influencer gets a bump, they look more justified because someone's paying them to make content, but no one's buying the product. Or it was only one post, and people need to see it seven, eight, ten times before they're going to buy. So what are your thoughts on that? And is there any guidance you can give people on paying influencers at different levels?
Joe Welstead: We try to not pay, at least on the first touch point. I don't think we've ever paid anybody to post about us as a first touch point. We're very happy to seed, very happy to get people to try the product, if we think their audience is relevant to us. If they post, and if they like the product and want to carry on a relationship, then we can talk about building a structure that everybody's happy with.
Joe Welstead: But basically, the way we see this, and this is part of our JAW Studios work as well, we help people figure this out: you've got your Meta ad machine where you're spending money, and in exactly the same way that your social trigger is going to help that money be more effective, people around that machine who are just vocal about your product are going to help that. It's going to feed the right kind of people into Meta's algorithm and into the audiences that you want to reach. So even if it's just one story post, the people who see it and then click on the sticker or our brand tag, they're in the funnel now. That's helpful for Meta, because it knows the profile of people who are interested in our product, that kind of thing.
Joe Welstead: And then, if somebody is really into it, we might do whitelisted ads, basically partnership ads. And this is something I think a lot of brands maybe haven't worked out yet, but also not every creator is aware of how powerful that can be for them. Meta loves the partnerships. Most brands know this now. But we've had one creator who we've been running ads with for over a year now, coming up to close to two years. And I've done the maths on this. Roughly, on average, for every pound that we spend on this person's ad, they get one new follower, at scale. So this person has gained over 100,000 followers since we've been running ads with them. So powerful for that person. So, so powerful. So this is where, if it all clicks, and the person is genuine and has authority in what they're talking about and is the right fit for the brand, everybody wins out of that.
Phillip Oakley: Yeah. I like the idea of the partnership, not just a vendor that I'm going to move on from, or someone who's willing to say whatever for a dollar and move on. Speaking of influencers, we've talked a lot about influencers outside this show, and it is just a part of modern marketing. It is something you need to consider. Coca-Cola and P&G have shifted much of their mass media budgets to what they call two-way conversations. So, paid influencers, right? And you can pull people from that into a community. I'd like to open up and talk about the Oshun community and Jack's involvement in that for a minute, if you don't mind. But you had an interesting experience with an influencer that I think people could learn from, too, where someone was paid, and they did a good job, and they really liked the product. And then magically, a few months later, they started promoting their own ripoff of the product.
Joe Welstead: We actually never paid this person. I remember we had a call with him. He wanted to be a part of the business. And we were like, I don't think so. You're a nice guy, but no, thank you. We're doing our own thing. But we gave him some product. He bought a few times. We weren't even necessarily aware of it, but when this all happened, I was like, let's check out his account on our Shopify store. And there were hundreds of pounds of LTV. I was like, well, this is funny. He was given one or two units and then bought some, talked about it, posted about us several times over a period of maybe 18 months. And then it died down. And then he started talking about how he was launching his own product, and it was going to be the first and only electrolytes designed for skin health, and it was revolutionary because it was the first electrolytes that were liquid and in a pump format. We were like, dude, what's going on here?
Phillip Oakley: What are you thinking?
Joe Welstead: So we tried to message him, but he was ignoring us at that point. And then a few weeks passed, and he did this whole other post where he was unboxing something, and he was super excited to show us the prototype for his new product. And it was exactly our packaging, our exact bottle. He could have literally bought our product and taken the label off, for all I know. I don't know how it happened. But this was the best part. We were like, this is not going to work for you. But it's a thorn in our heel. It's annoying that you're doing this. But he got destroyed in the court of public opinion and the court of social media. And I think he got quite scared at how vocal our customer base was. Really silly to not think that there was a very obvious overlap between his followers and our customers. He got trolled to the extent that I was feeling a bit uncomfortable about it. But hey, it's the game. I could see comments pop up and then disappear a minute later. It was pretty entertaining. Some weeks went past, and then eventually we got a voice note from him saying it wasn't really his brand. He was paid by a friend to be the face of it. Just utter bullshit. And anyway, he was backing off, because he realized that people knew about us.
Phillip Oakley: No shit, mate. You spread the brand! So, a few things. First of all, I was in the comments with my own torch. I was one of the people in the community rallying, because it pissed me off. First of all, it's just not right. But secondly, how are you so nearsighted, looking at yourself in the mirror, that you don't recognize that other people have memories? They have engagements. They probably bought the product because you promoted it. And I don't care if someone paid you to do it. You flat-out lied on camera.
Joe Welstead: I did something probably a little bit naughty when this was all unfolding. This is how silly this whole thing was. He had a published review on our store with his full name, which I screenshot and ran as an ad, with our product in his hand. Because we had a screenshot of a story from when he posted about our product. And I used that image of his hand using our product, with his review and his name overlaid on it. And I was just like, let's go.
Phillip Oakley: That's awesome. Man. Well, hopefully the young man learned a good lesson there, and will tell other people not to make the same mistake. But it spills over to the community conversation. It's not just paid, right? It's doing the right thing, doing something people want to be a part of, making a product that people want to buy, and organically building a community, which is another thing people think they can just buy and milk. They think you can build a community and milk dollars out of it, and that's not a real community. Can you talk about how you guys have built that community over time, and what it means for the business?
Joe Welstead: Yeah. I would start by saying I don't really believe in brand communities. I think it's a feel-good thing that we like to believe in. But outside of our brand and CPG marketing world, I don't think you'd take a customer of a brand and ask them if they feel part of the community. You don't go to somebody who's got an American Airlines frequent flyer card and collects miles and ask them if they feel part of the American Airlines community. It just feels a bit cringe. What are you talking about? I go to the lounge, I use the product, I like the product, but am I a community member? No, I'm a paying customer. I think we've sort of gaslit ourselves a little bit with this idea of brand communities.
Joe Welstead: And interestingly, Jack's previous experience before we started working together was doing the community events for The North Face across the UK and Europe. And he had a great time. He built a very good personal audience from it, because he was in front of so many people on a weekly basis. But essentially, when you do that every week for a few years, you realize this is the same people coming for a freebie. Everybody's having a good time, but it's the same people. And they're not really the paying customers. They're the people who want to come and have a good time and drink the free beers and go away with some free merch. And that's not all that valuable.
Joe Welstead: This is why I think brands have sort of gaslit themselves into thinking run clubs and all this stuff are really valuable. And it can be, if it's your basis for creating content and your storytelling is all based around that. That's fantastic, because suddenly you basically have a load of free actors. You're giving them a little bit of free product, and all these people turn up, and there's a vibe and there's energy, and you can use that in your content. Yeah, I can understand that. But on its own, I don't think it's all that valuable. I think what's valuable is essentially having a product so good that people want to buy it every single month. And having a product that has made such a difference to people's lives that when something comes up, they're willing to defend the brand or the founders. That's very powerful.
Phillip Oakley: Yeah. That's when the community is real. And we don't have to give it the community word. It doesn't have to have the C-word attached to it. You say we've gaslit ourselves, and there's lots of little labels that have popped up over the last several decades. I'm sure I'll get some flak for this, but things like "brand love." I'm not a big fan of brand love. I think it's affinity. There's a part of me that wants to connect with this brand, and it's my brand. Do I have smiley hearts for it? Probably pretty rare, right? But I felt it. Oshun is a product on my shelf. When I saw someone trying to rip it off, it was frustrating, and I picked up a torch and went after them. And it was nice to see other people feel the same way. So yeah, we can call that a community. But again, going back to the product that people want to pay for, the product is so important.
The Subscription Puzzle Phillip Oakley: Can we celebrate some big-time numbers for Oshun, by the way? 10,000 subscribers. There you go. Those are people who've bought more than once, not just our influencer friend. And more than 100,000 units sold. Congrat-u-freaking-lations, my friend. That's incredible. You've mentioned that your subscription revenue has also surpassed checkout revenue. Can you share with the listeners why that's important, and what that means?
Joe Welstead: Thank you. I actually don't know. It's a thing, though. It happened in August, so it's happened for two months now. It's great. It's great to have more recurring revenue than first-time revenue. I'm very happy with that. And everybody I've told is like, whoa, that's fantastic, well done. And I'm like, yeah, I think it's cool, but we're in our third year. So at the same time, I'm like, I think we need to grow faster, because I want the growth curve to be as exponential as possible. So it's very good. Don't get me wrong, I'm very happy with it. But also, I'm like, the growth of our checkout revenue should be as quick as our recurring revenue. So there are positives and negatives to it. It's definitely woken up a little bit of extra hunger in me. Okay, this is good. Now we need to accelerate. We need to go hard.
Phillip Oakley: Nice. And this is something important, too, and we should have a whole different episode on this, because it's a different stage of the business. A lot of people want to reference Byron Sharp and How Brands Grow. He'll never listen to this, but if he ever does hear me say it, his whole point is that in order to grow, you have to have new customers. There's a lot of people who pooh-pooh that, but no one ever said ignore the current customers for the sake of new customers. If you're not getting new customers, you're plateauing on what that monthly revenue looks like. So that can come in stages. You have a completely different focus now: not turning your back on the current customers, but going after new customers. You and I have also discussed some of the DTC tactics of tricking people into becoming subscribers, or trying to force or confuse them with add-ons at cart, and that's very frustrating. Why do so many DTC brands get that wrong?
Joe Welstead: Well, I think the black hat tactics of tricking people into subscription, that's not getting things wrong. That's just being deceitful, in my opinion. Now, with focusing on the metrics, there's a tendency to overestimate the importance of average order value, AOV. I think that is related to investor language. VCs are very, very keen to talk about your LTV-to-CAC ratio. I think it's a valuable trailing signal of product-market fit, but it's a slightly lazy one. From an investor perspective, where you're seeing hundreds of decks a week and assessing all these different opportunities, I think it's helpful for them. But from a brand perspective, especially if you're in the raising game, or if it's your first time in the game, you're going to hear this from people who look like they know what they're talking about, and you maybe consider them to be the voice of reason or the voice of authority, because they're venture capitalists. So the default is for founders to over-inflate the value of that ratio. I think it's a slightly lazy approach.
Joe Welstead: If you want to build real brand equity and have a valuable business, you basically need ten-year customers. You need brand advocates. People who are going to be loud and talk about it and defend your brand, tell their friends, tell their neighbors, tell their family about it at Thanksgiving. That's what you want, right? So this is the part that really kills me with investors, when they talk about a 12-month LTV-to-CAC ratio. I'm like, who gives a shit? Provided you're a sustainable business, your cash cycle is all good, the basic metrics are working, you've got a sound business, who cares about a 12-month marker when you want people to be with you for years? The way I see this now is, let's give it a number. If I want, in 2027, to unlock 30,000 ten-year customers, I probably need to have a hundred thousand new customers in the year. So why are we capping numbers at 12 months? Or even at 24 months? It's silly. It's really silly, in my opinion.
Joe Welstead: Even now, we're only in our third year, but why would we look at our 12-month cohorts? We've had customers with us since day one, providing value every single month, right? Thank you, Phil. That's who I want to have. And there's going to be a lot of misses. You have to be comfortable with the fact that 70% of your first-time customers are not going to be ten-year customers, at least, probably more than 70%. But the retention thing is the same thing. Institutional investors will say, cool, what's your retention on your subscriptions at month 12? And they'll probably want to hear a number that's higher than 30%. Cool. Lazy indicator. Because maybe your number is 26%, and they'll go, hmm, we really want that to go up a little bit. And now you're going to start gamifying it, right? On your month-six renewal, you're going to have a free gift, and then you're going to have this gizmo and this little extra thing, and most of the time it's all completely irrelevant to the product, utterly trash, and not improving the user experience of your product. So if your retention is 26 or 27% at month 12, but it's 20% at month 48, who cares about the month-12 marker? That's the way I see things now. I want real long-term customers, because that's where I think the commercial value is, but also the brand equity value.
Phillip Oakley: Yeah. And making the right decisions for the long term, as opposed to trying to gamify those things.
Joe Welstead: Well, this is why I went off on this tangent. Because if you're gamifying and deceiving people, you're not going to have a ten-year customer out of somebody who did not realize they subscribed. The reaction is going to be, fuck you, you're taking money again? I didn't authorize that charge. Yeah, it's in your small print. Yeah, legally you're covered, but it's bullshit, man. People need to know what they're signing up to. And if they don't, you're going to take their money twice, but you're not going to take it ten times. You're not going to take it fifty times.
Phillip Oakley: Yeah. So let's give you guys another shout. Of all the things that I've subscribed to over the years, and I'm going to go back to the '90s, when I was getting CDs for a penny, right, there hasn't been another subscription model that's made it easier for me to say, you know what, can I pause this month? Can I pause three months? Can I just push it off? There are gentle little nudges, there are little reminders: hey, this is coming. A lot of DTCs are doing that now, but you guys make it so easy. Forgive me for not remembering the mechanics, but once I felt like I didn't even log in, and somehow was able to say, yeah, hold it this month. So thank you, as a customer, for doing that. But also, the lesson for the listeners: it's really about the customer. That's what Joe is trying to say, right? It's about the customer and making that connection, giving them something they want to buy for a decade. But don't add friction at any point of the process, or you're going to lose people.
Joy as a Business Model Phillip Oakley: I have kept you for a long time, so I'm going to skip over some stuff, and we'll talk again in the future when you guys hit some more milestones. But I don't want to get away from JAW and DIRT. So can you quickly tell us how JAW stands for creating joy with these products?
Joe Welstead: Yeah. JAW is basically our venture studio, and it's an acronym for Joy by Atkinson and Welstead. My co-founder is Jack Atkinson, and I'm Joe Welstead. And the whole concept is based around what we want to do with any product launch that we have. The thesis is quite simple: it needs to improve your life and make you a more joyful person in one way or another. If it doesn't fit that remit, we're basically not interested.
Phillip Oakley: Nice. I love that. So you've also launched another, and I'm going to use "chaos packaging," because it's fun to say. I know it wasn't intended to be chaos packaging, but it's a delightful bottle, for DIRT, which is a high-polyphenol olive oil. And it looks like a big, large cologne bottle. We have one for the camera. Nice. It looks like nothing else on the supermarket shelf. I've paid attention, believe me, I've looked.
Joe Welstead: Yeah, it's cool. I absolutely love this bottle.
Phillip Oakley: I do, too. I'm going to have to get my hands on DIRT. I haven't ordered that yet. Now, you guys only launched that on Amazon, right? What was the thinking behind that?
Joe Welstead: Yep. Okay, so I can tell you about this. This is basically the second brand. JAW didn't exist when we launched Oshun, but we're considering it part of our venture studio umbrella, and DIRT is the second product brand to come out of it. First of all, we obviously don't have a lot of time for launching another brand, so that's where the Amazon route falls into play. Also, there's demand there. So we're basically playing a demand-response game, rather than a demand-generation game where you're doing the whole Meta and Shopify thing. We're placing a product where there's existing demand, and making it full of social triggers, and also extremely high quality.
Joe Welstead: The product is absolutely fantastic. And you're going to laugh at this, but this is how geeky we are with this stuff. This is essentially a square bottle shape, which is quite a unique bottle shape. It's not exactly square, but roughly speaking, it's square. It's got a delightful curve to it as well. When you hold it, it feels really nice in the hand. But the reason we picked this bottle, other than the fact that it's beautiful and eye-catching, is that when you're scrolling Amazon on your phone, the listings are square. Every image is a square. And if you have a thin, tall bottle in a square, you're using a tiny amount of the real estate. So that's why we locked in on that bottle. We were like, look, we think there's an opportunity here, but we're not going to have a lot of time for it day to day.
Phillip Oakley: So smart. Look at you.
Joe Welstead: So again, coming back to that design piece, the design needs to do a lot of heavy lifting here. The sourcing as well. We sourced an incredible product from Crete. But then the design and the form factor needed to do almost all of the heavy lifting in terms of converting people. And that's where it's demand response. On its own, this wouldn't work, because we would need ads and so on. But in an ecosystem where there's existing demand, and people are looking for something cool and maybe different, and ideally they're looking for a gift… This is the big play with DIRT. It's a highly giftable product. If you're going to a dinner party where maybe there's somebody who doesn't drink, or maybe you just don't want to bring a drink, maybe you want something else, the default is flowers or chocolate. It's nice, but it's a bit lame. Bringing a really nice bottle of olive oil that looks different, that is so obviously premium in the way that it looks and feels in your hand, is such a cool gift. It's such a great icebreaker.
Phillip Oakley: That is stupid brilliant. That is so freaking good. Again, let's go back to our four Ps. You paid attention to the placement, when everyone else was trying to figure out how to get their stupid skinny bottle to show up bigger. That is so smart.
Joe Welstead: Yeah. And they'll end up doing all kinds of weird things, like putting it at an angle, or putting a box next to it, and it ends up just looking a bit lame.
Phillip Oakley: That is so smart, Joe. Man, that's wonderful. All right, last thing before we get to our questions from friends. I think this was for DIRT, actually. You held up a Post-it note and posted it, I think on LinkedIn and Instagram, maybe somewhere else, with a sketched-out three steps for validating a product. Can you tell us about those three steps? And I'll make sure they're in the show notes as well.
Joe Welstead: Yeah. I already spoke about a couple of them. You want this idea of demand response, where demand already exists in the market. There's already some demand for this kind of product. You don't want to be swimming completely upstream. Ideally, you're part of a bigger wave. You're riding a trend that's not short-term, maybe an increase in awareness around a product. Oshun fits perfectly in this. We nailed the timing around hydration and electrolytes. And then we basically use micro- and macro-level trends.
Joe Welstead: I'll speak about Oshun for this, but DIRT is actually very similar. With Oshun, around 2023, there were a lot of people who started talking about DIY hydration hacks. These are the biohacker-type people who were doing slightly obscure things, like using a special kind of salt with watermelon, or juicing a watermelon, or juicing weird, weird fruits to get optimized hydration. And I thought, this is very interesting, because I'm sure that's fantastic, but 99% of people are not going to get up in the morning, get a fresh watermelon, juice it, and add some salt. That's a nice idea, but it's not going to happen in the real world on a daily basis. So that was the niche micro movement that I saw. And then, at a macro level, really simple things, like up-and-to-the-right Google searches, consistently over several years, is a pretty good macro-level indicator.
Joe Welstead: So you've got micro- and macro-level indicators. And then the third element is basically, what's your edge? What do you have that's going to give you a social trigger, or an advantage? Do you have special sourcing? Do you have special production capabilities? Do you have special content? Do you have special access? What is it that gives you your edge? So those are the three things: micro, macro, and your team edge. And then at the bottom, I think I had demand response. Is there existing demand for this kind of thing?
Phillip Oakley: That's brilliant. We'll put a link to your handwritten note in the show notes, because it was so cool. So what's next for JAW and Oshun?
Joe Welstead: Well, with Oshun, we had this target of 10,000 subscribers by the end of 2026. We set that target at the start of 2025. So we're basically working out our next big targets. But the switch to the glass bottle has been a big job, and I'm very happy that we've done it. I think the user experience is really elevated. And, this is not a very consumer-facing thing to say, but we basically want to own the counter space in households. If you're going to have a hydration enhancer on your kitchen counter, it's going to be Oshun. It's unlikely to be a brightly colored box of sachets out on your counter. That might be in your gym bag, no worries, nothing against that. But if you're going to have a water enhancer in your home, it's going to be Oshun. That's our big, at-scale target.
Joe Welstead: With JAW, we do a bit of consultancy work around helping people figure this out: their positioning, their angles, their strengths, and having confidence in the decisions that they make, and the confidence that allows them to make quicker decisions and not stay stuck for too long. We're not necessarily going to launch any other product anytime soon. We're pretty busy with what we have at the moment.
Phillip Oakley: Well, I'm sure you're helping some people keep focused on their bullseye, too.
Joe Welstead: Yeah. And it's quite nice, because we're not looking for retainers. What we try to do is equip founders with the tools and confidence to go and do their own thing, without paying somebody a service fee every month.
Phillip Oakley: So you're not tricking them into a subscription, is what you're saying?
Joe Welstead: Exactly.
Questions from Industry Friends Phillip Oakley: Nice. So let's get to the questions from industry friends. We go out and ask a few people we know what they would ask you if they were sitting in this chair. Our first is our buddy Ant Henderson. And what's funny is he knows so much about you, and you guys have worked together and done all the things. What he really wants to know is: what are the last three things you listened to on Spotify?
Joe Welstead: Okay, I'm going to have to pull it up. I've been really into French, how can I describe it, kind of spoken poetry, but R&B style. It's so good. I've been loving it. But here's something that's been really hyping me up. There's a song called "Don't Tell Your Dreams." I'm going to read you a little lyric, actually. It hypes me up so good.
Joe Welstead: [Joe reads the opening lyrics of "Don't Tell Your Dreams."]
Phillip Oakley: Nice. Love that. That's fantastic. You don't have to do it now, but maybe I'll text you. You've got to give me the R&B song so I can post that in the show notes, too. So that's two. Do you have a third?
Joe Welstead: This is a good song, but my kids, for whatever reason, I think they think the lyric is "ice cream" or something like that, but it's not. It's a song called "El Kilo," by Orishas, O-R-I-S-H-A-S. It's a really good Latino song. But I've had to listen to that a lot recently, because for whatever reason, my kids just love it.
Phillip Oakley: They like it. Nice. My kids are older, so I miss those days. I found a playlist of songs I played in the car with them, because we were commuting all over the place, and I go and listen to it because I just remember when they were little kids. So hang on to that song. It's going to be special again for the next few decades, I promise.
Phillip Oakley: Our second question comes from Graeme Fraser, and he preempted this, because he said, you guys might cover this in the show. I'll read his question, then I'll tell you a follow-up. "How much of the packaging design for Oshun was a conscious decision, and how much of it was organic? And how much of that learning fed into the packaging for DIRT, or any other future projects?" We did cover that pretty well, so what I want to do is push that a little further. Was there a packaging idea for Oshun or DIRT that you loved but killed, or something you tested that didn't work?
Joe Welstead: Yeah. I really like the moisturizer applicators. It's essentially the same idea as a pump, but it's a much tighter design. I liked that idea for Oshun. Really impractical with a very liquid product. But you know what I'm talking about? L'Oréal has a men's cream where you twist the top before you can press it. Something like that, where it's really secure, would be really nice, and it's a nice pump experience. But it just doesn't work in real life.
Joe Welstead: I'll tell you another little thing about DIRT, though. The form is very distinct, but we also really wanted it to have quite a provocative name. We felt like the form was not enough. There's a story behind DIRT. It's where everything comes from, it's where the olives come from. It comes from the dirt. But when you're scrolling, it's like, huh? It's very big words across the screen. So it's quite provocative, and it makes people ask questions. It's a social trigger.
Phillip Oakley: It's a thumb-stopper, right? It stops the scroll. Nice. Thank you, Graeme. This last one comes from someone I actually don't know, so this is Ant double-dipping for me. Thank you, Ant. He reached out to someone you both worked with at Motion, Phoebe Liebling. I don't know Phoebe, but since you all worked together, he reached out, and she was kind enough to share. Her question starts with a statement: "I've always seen you as someone who very much strikes their own path, often going against the commonly accepted, adopted norms in the way you do things. To great success!" If you were going to give someone starting a business one piece of advice that likely challenges the usual way, what would it be?
Joe Welstead: Trust Phoebe to ask a hard question. She's way smarter than I am. I think I'll go on a slight tangent. My brother's really keen on starting his own business right now. He's got a decent corporate job, but it doesn't excite him. He's thinking a lot about the different spaces that he could work in and so on. I think there's a lot of value in that. You need to find something that's going to work commercially, and all that stuff. But ultimately, I think you are the one who's going to make it work or not. And if you are a very driven and smart and business-savvy person, you pick the thing that you're going to enjoy the most, or hate the least, and that gives you the highest ceiling, and you just go for that. You're the X factor, right? What you pick is less important than you as a person. But you have to trust yourself and be confident in your ability, whichever way you go. And once you pick, commit and give it your all. I think the individual's ability to succeed is the greatest factor here. It's not what they pick.
Phillip Oakley: Excellent. I think that's great. You know, there are a lot of people who've purchased something like Jungle Scout for Amazon, because that's their side hustle. They want to go into a business, and they've scraped what's popular, what's working, where they can have it made cheaper. So it's not just "will this product work," but saying, I have a fire in my belly, and I want to go make a thing and sell it, and I'm going to go scout the product. I can see that kind of working. I'm not promoting Jungle Scout, by the way. I'm just saying I see…
Joe Welstead: No, but you see, if you go back to the framework we talked about, the data and the market and everything you can observe is one part of the piece. But your abilities are equal, maybe more important. So what is your sauce? What is your advantage? Maybe it's as simple as your entourage or your access. Maybe you're not smarter, maybe you're not the most creative, but you have access. Or maybe you're a fantastic copywriter. Maybe you're a fantastic storyteller. And that's your sauce. That's what's going to give you the advantage.
Closing Question Phillip Oakley: I love it. Joe, thank you so much. Closing question: if you could communicate one thing to every marketing channel in every city around the world simultaneously, what would that message be?
Joe Welstead: Communicate through the channels, to people?
Phillip Oakley: Take your time. And this is actually feedback from you to me. I'm trying to figure out a closing question that I can use every time without changing it per guest, and it's a speed bump for some people, so I'm open to feedback, too. What I'm trying to say is, what message do you really want to put out? And it doesn't have to be about your brand, either.
Joe Welstead: I'm not going to talk about my brand. I'll talk about just making the world a better place. I feel quite strongly about this. I feel like there's a lot of defeatist mindset with a lot of younger people, and opting out of doing something meaningful, or just opting out of the workplace, or just not a lot of enthusiasm for the future. I think that if you opt out, there's always going to be a small number of people who do opt in. And by opting out, you're giving them complete free rein over the future. They're going to have no competition. They're going to have a real easy ride. So you're basically betting on those people being good people, and that may not be the case. So you have to opt in. You have to do something, take control, and do stuff. And life's going to be good. It's going to be all right.
Phillip Oakley: Man. It's going to be all right. And opt in and be a part of making it all right. That's great. Perfect answer. Love it. I'll slap it on a T-shirt, Joe.
Joe Welstead: Yeah, exactly.
Sign Off Phillip Oakley: Thank you so much. How can the listeners learn more about you, JAW Studios, and Oshun?
Joe Welstead: drinkoshun.co. That's O-S-H-U-N. It sounds like "ocean." JAWstudios.co. And I'm Joe Welstead on LinkedIn, Instagram, and X. Come say hi.
Phillip Oakley: Come say hi. Joe, thank you for spending so much time with me. It's great to see you.
Joe Welstead: Thank you so much for having me.
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